Tap

With Miss Fresher’s night behind us, we finally got down to academics, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘in right earnest’. Mr. R.I. Shankland took British History (as well as ‘British Constitution’) classes at St. Stephen’s. Shanky was perfect for the job; he was British and had an iron constitution. He had been a keen wrestler in his youth and came to us in an excellent state of preservation, much like those wooly mammoths they keep digging out of the Siberian permafrost. Even though in late middle age, with a sparse fringe of white hair that surrounded the pink dome of his bald pate, like a moat around a castle, he commanded respect, something rarely found in us irreverent teenagers. Massive forearms, a back like Quasimodo’s minus the hunch, a bull-neck, and legs like tree-trunks did not augur well for a truant. No one took punga in Shanky’s classes.

He was utterly harmless. His capacity for fun was matched only by his deep knowledge and obvious love for his subject. He had a gift for bringing his topic vividly alive by the judicious use of off-color jokes and characteristic asides that seemed to be the hallmark of many of our outstanding faculty. I remember his lectures on the Tudors vividly. I can picture him at this very moment telling us about Henry VIII and his eight (successive) wives. The injustice of it all irks Shanky; not the fact that he executed two of them, but that Henry went and married eight times! Elizabeth I is known as the ‘virgin’ queen; this seems to rankle. He wonders at the dozen ‘royal toe-ticklers’ she employed (they tickled her toes with feather dusters), and thinks aloud, gazing abstractedly through the open window, how such a hedonist could be called a virgin, what with gallant, swashbuckling sailors like Walter Raleigh around. He sounds miffed. The pride of English Manhood is obviously at stake. Shanky dismisses the fact that she was virgin (‘unwed’, he insists, is le mot juste) simply because she was plain; “Who looks at the mantelpiece while stoking the fire?” is his famous rebuttal. The class erupts in a roar of approval. Stephania smiles to itself, knowing Shanky has just cracked a risqué one.

With females in College nowadays, Shanky’s style might have been severely cramped: his lectures would have lost their bite. To the ardent devotees who crammed into his tutorial room, he confessed he loved only two things in life: Elspeth, his wife, and his green Ford Prefect, and not necessarily in that order. (She’s in showroom condition after twenty years of faithful service: the Ford, I mean.) He maintained both with equal devotion, washing, polishing, lubricating, and shaving legs (the latter applies only to Elspeth, a stately lady, seldom seen, who worked in the British High Commission and who was awarded an OBE). Dear, unforgettable Shanky. How strange Stephania will seem today if I take a furtive short cut across the perfect lawns and fail to hear him bellow “Hullooooooooww! You there! Get off the grass! The graaaaaas! Get orf it!”

Prof. P.S. Dwivedi takes ‘Ancient India’. To say he is a master of his subject is to downsize him. With the casual nonchalance of the true maestro, he takes irreverent youths such as I, for whom the term ‘ancient India’ means anything older than granddad’s generation, through the hazy mists of times long past all the way back to the glory, dimly glimpsed, of an ancient civilization. He speaks softly, almost as if reminiscing about those far-off days he seems to be actually living through. We lean forward to catch every word, words that bring back the vanished grandeur of Vedic times,

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the great library of Pataliputra, Alexander, Porus, and Menander, Chandragupta Maurya, Samudragupta, and the bloodbath of Kalinga that turned Asoka into a Buddhist. Unknown to us, he watches us keenly with a sharp, penetrating eye. He has a style all his own in pulling up those not quite present. “ Chandrakant!” he chides a C.K. Sharma sated and sluggish after a hearty lunch, “just in case you are lost in an erotic haze about Chandravati, it’s spelt with a ‘v’, not a ‘w’, and it’s the name of a place, not that of a girl.” Phlegmatic, Brahminical, and inveterately conservative C.K. Sharma blushes to the roots of his hair as the class explodes in guffaws; his attention never strays thereafter in Dwivedi’s class. Cruel, but well meaning. Very effective, too. C.K. goes on to emerge as one of the top-scorers in ‘Ancient India’ in the B.A. Final examinations, and later joins the I.A.S.

Prof. Mohd. Amin takes ‘Medieval India’. God, another maestro…how many of them are there in Stephania? Amin Sahab is a raconteur par excellence. The romance of medieval times comes alive in the classroom. Who can forget his lectures on the Slave Dynasty, about Iltutmish and his beautiful, headstrong daughter Razziya Sultana. She takes a Moorish lover called Malik Kafur, a slave… both are murdered by a nobility who have never heard of Women’s Lib. The entire period appears to be one of Darwinian competition for the throne, with one’s life as the stake. The Turks and other Muslim invaders appear to be entirely innocent of any quaint notions such as filial devotion. For example, Juna Khan murders his uncle and sponsor Jalaluddin Khalji by chopping off his head in mid-river, and usurps the throne, calling himself Allauddin Khalji.

When Amin Sahab talks about this tyrant’s system of market regulations, draconian measures to contain everything from cheating by shop-keepers to inflationary trends (if shop-keepers were caught by the staff of the Weights and Measures department using spurious and non-standard weights, they had to suffer the pain and ignominy of having an amount equivalent to the shortfall sliced off their hind-quarters!), one is very glad that one is not a retailer in those harsh times of rough-and-ready justice, and that one’s perfectly-intact backside is comfortably ensconced in the classroom chair. Keeping one’s skin intact, ditto for one’s ass, takes on real meaning.

Amin Sahab sweeps through the Tughlaq Dynasty, and finally brings the Mughals to us. We feel for young Babur, son and heir of Umar Shaikh, ruler of Ferghana (in modern Uzbekistan), as he struggles to escape obscurity. He takes and loses Kabul half a dozen times, and then, despairingly, scans further afield. Daulat Khan Lodi tips him off about his boss Ibrahim’s effete rule of a kingdom in north India, and he responds in a last, determined, attempt, to make good. He snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, crushing Ibrahim Lodi’s huge, unwieldy army with cannon fire.

Quoting from the Baburnama, Amin Sahab makes us feel like onlookers at the First Battle of Panipat. And we mourn with Babur’s family as he circumambulates seven times the bed of the dying Humayun, relinquishing his own life for that of his son. Poor, unhappy, ill-fated Humayun; a wanderer who regains his throne only after the usurper Sher Shah dies, to prematurely perish in a fall down a staircase. Stanley Lane-Poole says of this ill-starred second Mughal emperor (as I quote from memory, please forgive me if I’ve lost a word here or there): “ If there was a chance to fall, Humayun was not the man to miss it. He tumbled through life, and he tumbled out of it.” Amin Sahib’s coverage of Mughal India is thorough, breathtaking. I realize this only when I reach the post-graduate level in my studies and have to consult source material myself.

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Dapper, irrepressible, sports-loving Amin Sahab. Unusually well attended as his memorable lectures were, it is for his wit, perhaps, that he is most remembered. When asked why he kept his (neatly trimmed Ronald Colman-type) moustache, he replies that it is not he who keeps the moustache: it is we who shave it off! In so doing, he is merely underscoring the importance of perspective, and the need for a student of history to appreciate, but not judge, all points of view. No Marxist interpretations of history here: just get the facts straight, present the various viewpoints, submit your analysis and let the reader decide.

When Rajiv Sethi, sitting next to a quiet, darkly handsome, clean-cut Shashi Singh, stands up to ask a question in his inimitable accent, Amin Sahab looks up at the ceiling as if for inspiration. “Some people,” he says pointedly to no one in particular, “seem to mistake effeminacy for sophistication.” Crushing. Amin Sahab’s ebullient son, Shahid, two years after me in College, is an even more irrepressible edition of his father. He carries on the tradition, succeeding Amin Sahab Sr. to occupy, in due course, the Medieval India chair at St. Stephen’s. If I have read the bloodlines correctly, there will be tales told by later generations of the other brilliant Amin Sahab who taught History at Stephania.

By now, you must be wondering why someone doesn’t fix that leaky tap which is the mysterious heading of this slice of history, so that we can all go home. The reason is simple; this is one tap you can’t fix (how we tried!). Tap is a guy! Whether he is leaky or not is your call. And what a guy is Tap, as I slowly find out! Taposh Roy Chowdhury! The name is read out in the roll call that precedes every lecture, but no one present raises a hand. Being a Bong (a Bengali, to the uninitiated) myself, my curiosity is aroused. Who is this missing Bong/ why is he missing/ is he that scared of ragging? He must be a pansy type, then. Forget him.

Later, I have to eat my words: Tap is no pansy, and he is quite unforgettable. He becomes a legend in Stephania (for all the wrong reasons, many would add; now that’s criticism coming from people who haven’t seen Tap up close and personal). Tap is living proof that our lives are interlinked. The life of each and every one of us earthlings, young or old, rich or poor, smart or dumb, impinges on the lives of the others. We create ripples as we go through life, ripples that rock other people’s boats and change the course of their lives forever. It’s amazing, but it’s true. The Story of Tap will serve to illustrate this, so fasten your seat belts. I beg your pardon, Messieurs and Mademoiselles, for the delay in getting on with my story.

One day, a hand goes up in response to the name. The chap appears to be a shade over six feet, swarthy, very close-cropped hair, sky-blue shirt, pale blue jeans, black shoes, finely built. Sportsman type. After class, I go over and introduce myself. It seems he’s just lost his favorite sister to cancer, hence the delay in joining. He’d shaved his head, which explains the ‘crew-cut’. I am inwardly mortified about, and deeply regret, all the nasty things I’d been thinking about him. We become inseparable. He shares a room in Rudra South, the block opposite mine, with one Sandeep Bagchi (today better known as Dr. Sandeep Bagchi, IAS, the author of a definitive book on Indian classical music). Sandeep has thick, curly hair which prompts a senior to make him recite “Baa Baa Bagchi, have you any wool?”

The nickname sticks; he is even today affectionately called ‘Baa Baa’ by his close friends, among them ‘Bong’ Banerjee (an IAS officer himself, ‘Bong’ could draw Don Martin characters better than Don Martin himself), and ‘Kookie’ Menon, currently India’s National Security Advisor. Tap’s accommodating roommate Baa Baa is

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a Dosco (an alumnus of The Doon School—India’s answer to Harrow), a keen mountaineer-trekker, and a very warm and outgoing person who takes the endless stream of Tap’s visitors in his stride.

The Dean, Rev. William Rajpal, had from that very year [1965] started a system of room-sharing for freshmen. I’m in G-2, which is a small, under-a-staircase cubbyhole, so I don’t have to share it. There's no space for even a mouse once I'm in residence. Mukherjee Block, just before the wicket-gate [a name I gave it that stuck] that leads to the coffee house—is under construction. It will be inaugurated next year, when the shortage of accommodation is expected to ease. Baa Baa’s bright, obviously: you don’t get Physics (Hons.) in College unless you got a high first division in your school-leaving exam.

I soon discovered that Tap had three major passions in life: cars, motorbikes…and food! He has been known to buy a one-rupee daily pass on the DTU (the present Delhi Transport Corporation’s earlier avatar, the now-defunct and unlamented Delhi Transport Undertaking) to ride all over the city, car-spotting. That means he’s really serious about cars. I wouldn’t attempt a feat like that even if Pamela Anderson went down on her shapely knees and asked it of me. Men like ace comedian Asghar Ali Khan have select Playboy centrespreads plastered all over the walls of their rooms.

Tap sticks to pictures of cars—American gas-guzzlers, Continental sports coupés, Scandinavian jobs like Volvo and Saab, Formula 1 GT cars—they are the stuff Tap’s dreams are made of. Later, what little space is left on the walls is occupied by large, glossy posters courtesy Honda , who have gallantly responded to his fervent plea for pictures. From little step-through scooterettes, the powerful but economical CB 400 medium-sized machine (my personal choice) to the legendary CB 650 Superbike that wiped out the last vestiges of British opposition, they are all there. Everything on the wall is out of reach—but hang on: Tap’s Dad has promised him a Royal Enfield 350 cc Bullet motorcycle next year. 1965-66 passes very slowly for Tap…and for me, his slated pillion rider.

One thing about Tap, it’s easy to keep him in good humor: just feed him. Ansar Ali Syed (also History [Hons.]; he’s from St. Xavier’s, Jaipur) observes with candor that other guys are, if inebriated, drunk. Tap is, if fed well, ate! It’s true. A well topped-up Tap is like a Ferrari with all twelve cylinders on song. It’s at these times that Tappisms come thick and fast. If I’d got down to keeping the diary I daily promised myself I would, today I’d be a Dollar millionaire several times over. I couldn’t. I was too busy rolling about on the floor, laughing my guts out.

Soon joining the festivities are the pardner and his chums Manoj Chakravarty and Ashok Jha. Our future motorcycle gang is about complete. We realise that Tappisms, to flow freely, need a lethal combination of Tap, large quantities of fodder, his unique view of life, the smattering of English he’s picked up en route to College, schooling at St. Xavier’s Hazaribagh—Lawrence Rydquist, also from Xavier’s Hazaribagh, is maha thrilled to see an old chum (see ‘A Freshman in Stephania’ in the abstract from my memoirs Memories Are Made Of This) and his solidly respectable Calcutta background (he used to then live at 14/2, Raipur East Road, Jadavpur, Calcutta, now Kolkata).

Needless to say, only Tap possesses this desired combination, a fact that makes him worth his weight in gold to us, starved as we are of good, healthy entertainment. Remember, this was an era before Dr. Manmohan Singh’s Liberalization

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and Globalization (read ‘westernization’) liberated the Indian economy from the tyranny of the license Raj. There was no MTv, no Star World, no HBO, no Cartoon Channel…nothing. No discos, no Macdonald’s, no KFC, no PVR movie halls, no multiplexes, no MP3/ MP4, no Times FM, no mobile phones, no United Colors of Benetton, no Nike, Reebok or Adidas, no Ritu Beri or Rina Dhaka, no Victoria’s Secret, no Madonna, not even a Jennifer Lopez or a Geri Halliwell. There had been Rita Faria and Persis Khambatta, but the Indian beauty industry that churned out the likes of Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai did not exist. Thank God for Tap…and Tappisms!

Tappisms kept us sane. An example: we are in our second year at College; taking a stroll in the grounds, we see a tall, lanky freshman approaching. Tap is watching him fiercely, eyes narrowed: I know the giant mind is grappling with a weighty problem. I hold my breath: something momentous is about to happen. Sure enough, as the stripling walks past, the furrows in tap’s brow clear. He turns to me with the air of one who has discovered the key to some ancient mystery.

“Subroto,” he exclaims, “remember my telling you there was something very wrong with that particular fresher? Well, I’ve discovered what it is.” He pauses, savoring the moment.

“Well…spit it out, Tap” I prod, a bit curious myself about the overgrown kid whose adolescent musculature hadn’t yet caught up with his man-sized frame, “What’s wrong with Sanjay Kher?”

“Subroto” says Tap proudly, happily “his foot are too tall” …and wonders what I’m doing down there in the grass, holding my sides and rolling about, howling and moaning as if in great pain.

The rest of the gang is identically affected when I repeat the Tappism to them. I am relieved; it is a genuine Tappism, an original. It has stayed with me for thirty-five years, and recalling it never fails to evoke tears of mirth, a time-tested stress-buster if ever I had one. Here’s another. We are taking the short cut under the trees and over the boundary wall en route to Mukherjee Block. Tap pulls up suddenly, right under the trees, frozen in his tracks. I wonder if he’s seen a snake or something. “What’s it, Tap?” I yell in panic.

He turns around very slowly, as if in a dream. I notice he’s wearing his new jacket, the elegant one he’s just collected from D. Vaish & Co., Connaught Place. Dribbling down the front of it, and down most of what now bears but faint resemblance to a human face, is a thick, slimy stream of white-and-gray ooze. He appears to be in shock. He doesn’t make things any easier for both of us by explaining, in a plaintive tone, the cause of his sudden transformation. “Subroto”, he pleads, as if for understanding, “some bird shitted.”

There go my glad rags; the grass is thick here, and none too clean. Not suitable for rolling about in. Tappisms are not recommended in terrain such as this.

Remember the joke about the little kid who’d piddle in a corner of the classroom and leave a note to the effect that the Phantom Piddler had struck…again? Tap approves of the joke. But since, for Tap, Lee Falk’s Ghost Who Walks is the ‘Panthom’, the ‘F’ sound in ‘Phantom’ transfers to the second word, ‘Piddler’. So it is not surprising that whenever Tap has to use the men’s room, he solemnly announces that he is ‘going for a fiddle’! We always crack up. Poor Tap: he never could figure out where he was going wrong, but he took all the ribbing very sportingly.

There was only one occasion when I saw him lose his cool. It happened thus. He had been poring over some car magazines and finally, in a paroxysm of lust,

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began to compose a letter to the CEO of General Motors broadly on the lines of the one he’d written to Soichiro Honda. But since he was writing to Zeus himself, Tap pulled out all the stops. Half the wastepaper basket was full before he adjudged that the draft was perfect. But when he re-read his effort after lunch, he wasn’t so sure.

Be it known to all and sundry that the great masters of English prose and Tap were not acquainted…which was their (the Great Masters’) loss. For Tap had unwittingly drafted a masterpiece they would have been proud to claim as their own…provided they had set out to write the finest piece of surreal twaddle the world had ever seen. Even Tap realized that he’d surpassed himself; the sheet of paper, torn into a dozen pieces, joined the other scraps in the WPB. Which is where we found them, when Tap went for a shower, armed with soap and talcum powder, prior to his customary post-lunch siesta.

The precious document was painstakingly reconstructed, pasted on poster paper and, captioned with suitable words clipped from the day’s newspaper, pinned to the notice board with Rampal’s cooperation. Pandemonium reigned around the said boards at teatime. The racket attracted Tap, whose room was just around the corner, near the coin-operated public telephone. Jaws agape, he read the caption composed from words culled from the newspaper: “Chowdhury makes a Bloomer.” Above it was his lovingly crafted piece of deathless prose that had driven him to despair. Now he was beyond despair, poor chap, he was in purgatory, as Stephania came alive to his hitherto unsuspected literary skills.

Tap went into neutral: and stayed there. He sort of shut down. His metabolism slowed to catatonic level. Even his appetite deserted him. This was serious. Overtaken by remorse, we took down the evil document, destroyed it, and made amends to Tap as best we could. Edibles of the sort known to be favored by him were delivered at his door. Baa Baa knew something was seriously wrong, but vacated the scene. Gradually, tap thawed; food…glorious food, had worked, as we had known it would! But we never played a cruel joke like this on Tap again. It seems that even he, existing as he did at that fundamental level of life he so blissfully shared with unicellular organisms such as amoeba, had sensibilities. Bentham was right when he maintained that all life, no matter how basic, reacts by moving away from pain and towards pleasure. He might have been describing Tap, so beautifully had he put it.

In retrospect, we acted in haste. That unique document we had so remorsefully shredded was absolutely irreplaceable. Tap himself could never reproduce it word for word, even if he wanted to. It was a product of Divine Inspiration that comes but once in a lifetime. And thus was forever lost to Mankind yet another treasure. We were poorer by millions. Even the pardner, who took the Gold Medal in Economics from Delhi University in 1966, later admitted that he could never hope to equal Tap’s literary tour de force. I knew now how the residents of the ancient Buddhist monastery felt (if any were left alive by Bakhtiar Khilji and his murderous hordes) when all the priceless scrolls of the library went up in flames, in 1193.

Later, Tap displayed a streak of low cunning, so alien to his nature, when it came to covering his tracks, viz., leaving his deathless works lying about in the public domain, giving the hoi polloi free access to them. In fact, I think he just stopped writing, period. Not counting, of course, letters home, or taking down notes in class—which was, in any case a waste of paper and ink given the fact that c. 75% was indecipherable even to him the very next day. The wriggling mass of squiggles, however, conveyed the reassuring message to recipients of his writings that Tap was still functional, which was

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hardly surprising given that the building blocks of protozoan life—food, water, air, and sunshine—were available in abundance, and which were all, apart from lots of talcum powder and sleep, that he ever really needed.

Tap tunes in

As I’ve suggested in ‘Tap’, the lives of men are much more closely interlinked than we realize. I can think of no better example to illustrate this than Tap’s life. I still maintain that eating and sleeping were his major preoccupations, but many would hotly contest the issue, pointing out that showering and talcum powdering himself all over, prior to hitting the sack for a solid two-hour siesta, was an equally important activity with him. Instead of going into the merits or demerits of the various arguments, let us confront the facts: Tap was an hitherto-undiscovered protozoan life-form of suspiciously human appearance, and in possession of rudimentary biophysical processes uncannily akin to those of homo sapiens.

But even his detractors would be forced to admit that, when not engaged in major life-sustaining activities such as wrapping himself around vast quantities of food and tapping into (pun unintended) other sources of sustenance, he displayed one characteristic that differentiated him from, let us say, a paramecium. Nature had, as always, compensated, and in return for all what she had failed to program into Tap, she had bestowed on him a gift highly prized among men…genuine musical talent. Tap was a decidedly accomplished mouth-organist.

Far away, in distant Germany, is a firm renowned for making fine musical instruments. It is known simply as M.Hohner, Gmbh. In the late ‘fifties, MHG had sold a Chromonika III, then their top-of-the-line mouth organ, to one Subhendu Roy Chowdhury, for a large sum of Deutsch Marks. It crossed over into India, and became the property of the buyer’s kid brother, later known to the world – and to a fan following at least as large as Jughead’s – as ‘Tap’. Tap, often mistaken for his comic (comical?) counterpart, fairly worshiped Larry Adler, the greatest mouth-organist of all time (who died in mid-2001). One can imagine his awe at finding himself holding a replica of the very instrument used by the maestro himself.

Indeed, Hohner have a range of mouth organs, from the exquisite, palm-sized ‘Puck’ (a diminutive pocket mouth-organ which, in the right hands, is capable of producing wondrous melody, as it did in the case of 100 meters specialist Ramesh Bakshi---later a Wing Commander in the Indian Air Force and killed in a Dassault-MIRAGE 2000 crash in 1988—a good friend and class-fellow of mine at Sherwood), to the highly sophisticated Chromonika III with its thumb-activated, spring-loaded scale change pushbutton, a specimen of which now lay tightly clutched in Tap’s trembling hands.

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Just a pair of hands and a wind instrument (the mouth-organ, not Tap)—two elements of a karmic chain reaction the downstream effects of which would change the lives of many of us forever.

Readers will recollect that the average college student of those days, Bohemians excluded, led a life-style that can only be described as austere, even Spartan. As compared to the disco-driven, twittering and jiving jetsetters of today, we were monks…and the need for a social life was keenly felt by many of us. I am fondly but condescendingly dismissed as a hopeless case that but eats, sleeps and dreams of nothing other than hunting and fishing. The rest of the gang (Tap also excluded; you know what he’s obsessed with, and it’s not girls) is desperate for some mixed company, what with Miranda House, with its full load of effervescent, eye-grabbing feminity being practically a stone’s throw away.

The Coffee House is where these houris appear at dusk to tantalize, seemingly unaware of – or indifferent to – the soulful stares of the salivating, girl-starved males. Even the most casual observer, however, can hardly fail to notice (my eyes, now equipped with hindsight, can see clearly what is going on; funny, how I didn’t spot it then) that these lovelies are just as keen to gain the acquaintance of the gentlemen they fancy, as those unwashed worthies are to meet their lady ‘loves’.

There is, however, one massive impediment, an insurmountable hurdle, that comes in the way of what follows ‘girl-meets-boy’: a proper introduction, for Christ’s sake, so that girl and boy get to meet, in the first place. This is not a London pub: one can’t just sidle up to a girl at a bar and, after breaking the ice with a suitable one-liner, get on with things. This is India in the mid-sixties, and here a decent introduction is a sine qua non. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that, as probably obtains even today, men with female friends are tremendously popular, being seen as enabling resources—portals to a social life.

To the amazement of all, help materializes from the most unlikely quarters. Tap always goes home to Calcutta, the Kolkata of today, riding the AC Deluxe chair car train. Now, this train happens to also transport dozens of damsels (mostly English (Hons.) Delhi University students headed Cal-wards for identical reasons), and though the journey is not long, a mere twenty-two hours or so, it is tedious. Long distance chair car runs are strenuous stuff, and occupants tend to take frequent walks up and down the vestibules linking compartments or hang out in the lobbies. Tap is no exception minus the walking up and down.

Walking, even the mere mention of it, is tiring for Tap. “Subroto”, he gently suggests to me one day as I put him through his paces near the flagstaff on the ridge, “let’s not go anywhere that goes up.” Here he uses an expressive ‘plane-taking-off’ gesture of the hand to emphasize his point that even gentle gradients do not find favor with him.

Anything that entails the consumption of energy is persona non grata with Tap, for energy is at a premium. Grazing and sluicing cost money which, Tap hears, is obtained by a complicated process involving, again, the expenditure of sizeable quanta of energy. Tap is all for energy conservation, deprived as he is of his vital post-lunch siesta. Walking is out, entailing as it does the use of copious quantities of his dwindling power back-up, fortunately replenishible at frequent intervals from the train’s restaurant car. Still, as stations whiz past, tunes zip through his head.

Tap is a proto-sybarite, and food and music mix well in him. He whips out the Chromonika III and lets fly with one number after another (as I discover when I piece

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together the sequence of events later). Soon, a circle of music lovers, mostly girls, surrounds him, and requests for hits start coming in. Tap obliges, raking in thanks and compliments. He strikes up acquaintanceships. Cut to our second year in College. As long as he doesn't articulate, Tap is quite a hunk—the stereotype of the strong, silent, macho male.

July 1966. It so transpires that the pardner has won the Gold Medal for Economics (Hons.) from Delhi University, and among the avalanche of prizes is one of particular significance, a Rajdoot motorcycle [DHN 5376] from his father (see ‘Vij’ in the abstract from my memoirs Memories Are Made of This, available in this selection). The pardner's chum Jerry also gets a Lambretta scooter [RJR 4579]. Accessories vital to lubricating their social lives have fallen into their hands. They are like cannon, all primed and ready to go off. Lo and behold! None other than old Tap ignites the fuse. For, one day at the Coffee House soon after the University re-opens, the above-mentioned former footsloggers notice to their amazement that friend Tap gets cheery waves and enthusiastic “Hi, there!”s from sundry (and sultry) young females in the Coffee House.

Back in his room, ankles securely trussed, his arms pinioned behind his back, and cut off from food supplies for an appreciable length of time—about half-an-hour, if I remember correctly—a beleaguered Tap dazedly coughs up the ‘secret’ he was unsuspectingly privy to. It all comes out: the AC Deluxe to Calcutta, the mouth organ (promptly re-christened ‘The Introductor’), and the galaxy of female fans. Tap is stunned; he can’t figure out what the fuss is all about, since it falls well outside his area of core competence, viz. sunshine, air, food and sleep. Innocent of basic management techniques such as ‘environment scanning’ and ‘SWOT’ analysis, we have stumbled upon, thanks to Tap, a couple of fundamental techniques of man-management: categorize the greedy and the needy, and judiciously apply both carrot as well as stick to either category, mutatis mutandis. As a reward for his cooperation, Tap gets a banana, with a promise that many more, even better delicacies will follow, if he will so exert himself as to perform the introductions…

Very soon, we find ourselves sitting with real, live females at the Coffee House. Tap and I are untouched: our interests lie elsewhere, and gradually we de-link ourselves from the bunch. I don’t find the conversation particularly fascinating, as the pardner and his cronies Jerry and Manoj so obviously do. Gradually, a subtle process of pairing-off starts, but, whereas the last two are soon going steady, the pardner is having a rough time with his date. To my dismay, sans the pardner, now answering a seasonal call of the blood, valuable time that could have been spent in the field has now to be invested in the library, workouts (St. Stephen’s gymnasium was non-existent then; its construction started in my final year, 1969-70) on the terrace, and better attendance of society functions, especially the Wodehouse and Photographic societies. Here the pardner has done me a great favor: he exposes me to the rudiments of darkroom techniques. One day, he leaves the darkroom key with me, and the result is that I spend six solid hours alone, making enlargements of some my favorite angling snapshots. The bug has bitten me badly, and in years to come, the experience will pay off.

Fortunately, the birthdays of all of us fall within the academic year. The birthday girl or boy has to treat the others to dinner, and the venue is invariably Mikado’s, a reasonably good Chinese joint opposite Rivoli cinema. The bill for six or seven of us usually comes to about sixty-five rupees. There is even a band and a dance-floor all of eight feet in diameter. I see little point in clutching some unattractive (to me, at least) female and twirling her around the circle doing something called the fox trot.

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The hunter in me rebels: foxes don’t trot, and horses that go after them along with baying hounds don’t, either. It’s all tommyrot to me. The food and the music are important, but I don’t quite care about the invasion of these women into our crowd. My disaffection is obvious, and none of the females take a shine to me, either, which suits me just fine. For once, Tap is right. I stick with him by sitting closer to the food than to the music. ‘Always follow an expert when you are on his home turf ’ is my motto.

Although the food at Mikado’s was good, the service was extremely slow. It could take about half an hour for the Chicken Sweet Corn Soup to make its appearance after the order, and another similar period of time before the main dishes started trickling in. For a famished biped like Tap, this was like the ordeal the Allied troops faced before Eisenhower launched the armada at Normandy. The soup becomes a fond but rapidly fading memory for Tap about ten minutes after he has engulfed it. He starts slavering at the jowls, gently, urbanely, much like those ravenous Roman lions that got but one Christian a week.

He starts violently every time the kitchen door opens, and squares his shoulders preparatory to launching a direct frontal assault on the forthcoming comestibles. Alas! The waiter, a tray full of aromatic delicacies casually balanced on his shoulder, glides off to someone else’s table. The disappointed look on Tap’s face is comical. Then he winces as his stomach grumbles and goes into yet another set of convulsions. Yes, Tap has to work hard for that dinner at "Mig’s" as he calls this fine eatery that has, sadly, given way to a clothing outlet. More than thirty-five years ago, however, it had the distinction of serving and feeding Tap, one of the All-Time Greats Who ever Fed.

Tap’s need for food is so frequent and so steady that the pardner suggests that we get him a nosebag, like the ones used by tonga-wallahs for feeding their horses. To the uninitiated, a nosebag is a jhola-like bag full of gram or whatever they feed these equines. This bag is slipped over the muzzle and fastened at the back, thus ensuring that the beast can feed whenever it wants to. I am reasonably sure that Tap would not have approved of the nosebag idea. True, it’s potential for delivering a steady flow of nutrients was enormous, but this was offset by one grave disadvantage: it restricted intake to the contents of the said bag.

This would probably have been unacceptable to Tap who – apart from his likelihood to scoff at the ungenerous capacity of the bag – was omnivorous to the extent of ingesting anything that ran, swam, walked, grew out of the soil or fluttered down from the sky. Tap’s inner clock was programmed to operate from a base year (and this is an educated guess) sometime around 3 billion B.C., and hadn’t quite caught up with the twentieth century.

He was a walking relic, a paleozoological curiosity, a throwback to a time when the earth was young, his system synchronized to the circadian rhythm of an age that had passed long before the dinosaurs ruled the earth. He moved about during his brief waking hours in a happy daze, dreaming of food and gravitating from one edible article to another, much like his nearest living relative, zoologically-speaking…the amoeba.

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Tap and the Phantom Bullet

Some of you may recall my mentioning that Tap’s Dad had promised him a Bullet motorcycle (see ‘Tap’). We endured the first year stoically. I say ‘we’ because we were in it together. He couldn’t rest until he had one, and I, who could never hope to receive such an expensive bike as a gift, fervently hoped that Tap would get one so that I, too, could get to ride my dream machine. Our second year passed fretfully as, despite assurances from Tap that it was “due any day now”, nothing happened.

I was now the Honorary President of the All-India Pillion Riders Association, having taken over the post from the last incumbent, Jerry, who had rendered himself ineligible for the job after he got RJR 4579. Never did I hold a post I detested as much. I was impatient for the day when Tap’s bike would come. Meanwhile, Tap catalogued all Bullet owners in the university. He knew their movements, their current girl friends, their particular driving techniques, the modifications each had made to their machines. He was always in a lather of anticipation over the coming windfall.

But when the third (and final year) of our graduation was well underway, I realized, with a sinking feeling, that the Bullet was not going to happen. I think Tap sensed it, too, for he became a little flippant about it, but he couldn’t fool me. It was a big blow for him. He needed the motorcycle badly in order to reinstate himself in the pecking order, having slid down it drastically. Having performed the introductions to girls he knew in Miranda House, he had exhausted his usefulness to the pardner and his cronies (such is life), caught up as they were in the heady happenings of their newfound social ambit. But, to his credit, he never said a word against his father.

Some years later, I found myself flying to Calcutta for a couple of days’ work and went straight from the airport to 14/2, Raipur East Road, Jadavpur. A tall, elderly gentleman, who was obviously Tap’s father, accosted me at the head of the stairs and told me that Tap wasn’t home. I betook myself to a hotel, but not before a neighbor had jotted down my office telephone number. The next day, there was a frantic call from Tap; he was picking me up from office at 5 pm sharp and taking me home. As he helped me with my bags at the hotel, Tap muttered embarrassedly that I shouldn’t mind, his father was very old now and somewhat absent-minded after Tap’s mother had passed away. I was touched by his sincerity and sense of responsibility. Thus did Tap gallantly salvage his honor and redeem himself in my eyes. I thought I now knew, sadly, why the Bullet had never left the Phantom Zone.

With the induction of women, our motorcycle gang broke up. Here I again draw your attention, dear reader, to some remarks I made in earlier passages of this collection to the effect that the lives of all men are so subtly interlinked that even one small act by one has a cascading effect on all others. Tap and his mouth organ triggered off major changes in the patterns of our lives, changes which would have far-reaching consequences for all of us. The unit was now fragmented into three incompatible categories: those who had both bike and babe (the pardner and Jerry), those who had no bike but babe (Manoj), with Tap and I bringing up the rear with neither bike nor babe.

Not that it mattered to me, I tell you frankly. I already had enough on my plate, but Tap was terribly disoriented. He tried desperately to reinstate the carefree routine of the old days, but this was our final year and three years of ‘study’ was about to be tested (in those days, there was no mollycoddling semester system that staggered the

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examination workload over three years. In our time, all the papers were examined in the final year, making it more of a grueling test of stamina and memory than anything else).

We all passed, to our surprise, the pardner again getting a First Division but no Gold Medal this time…his ‘extra-curricular’ activities had slowed him down a trifle, apparently. Jerry, serious and steady as always, got into the IAS and married his girl, getting off the starting blocks first by siring a baby girl. Manoj got selected by Indiafoils Ltd. and soon tied the knot with his dusky ladylove.

Only the pardner didn’t take the plunge. His date was not as compliant, apparently, as he wished her to be, and he always was one to take a test drive before investing, the hallmark of a good investment banker. Coincidentally, he was selected by what was then called National and Grindlay’s Bank, and sent off to England for training, from where he reported for duty at Calcutta, Rajdoot and all, and where, finally, he met the girl of his dreams, beautiful, intelligent (and definitely his superior cerebrally). Far more talented than him, she is the most adaptable and balanced person one can ever hope to encounter. Truly, the pardner was not only lucky, he was now really wealthy to boot, for he had annexed a pearl beyond price, the lucky bounder.

I was determined to do better academically in M.A. after failing (by a long chalk) to get a First in B.A. Tap realized this after a while and gradually gave up on me as a lost cause. He knew I had nothing to fall back upon, whereas he had connections and a large house in Chanakyapuri, a posh residential area of New Delhi. I just about managed to get a First Division in M.A., and joined the Shriram Group of Industries (see ‘Vij, Arjun, Major, IC-17575’) in Delhi. My unit was the one that made India’s then leading brand of sewing machines, electric fans, and refrigeration items under the ‘USHA’ brand name. One day, my friend Thomas was dropping me to the New Delhi station on his bike, coincidentally, a Bullet. We were halted by a traffic light on Janpath when I spotted Tap in the crowd. He heard my yell and ran across. We exchanged addresses: I promised to contact him on my return.

Back in Delhi, I give Tap a tinkle. He is staying with some folks in New Friends Colony. I’d never been there, and I was about twenty minutes late locating the house. The roads were a mess, I remember; it was then a very new residential development. He was waiting, standing lookout on a balcony on the first floor. He ran down, surprised that I was on a brand new Bullet. A wistful look crossed his face as he got on the pillion. I wanted to give him something to remember me by. Starting off very slowly and sedately, so as to let him get used to the machine, I took it very carefully over the makeshift roads and onto solid tarmac. Even here, I held the bike in check for a few minutes, letting him savor the slow, well-separated thumps of the deep note.

Then suddenly, in mid-traffic, I gunned the engine, producing the savage surge of power typical to this machine as one goes through the gears. By the time I was in top we were cruising at a smooth eighty kilometers an hour, the bike rock-steady as usual as it weaved like a ballet dancer through the light traffic. I pulled over in a lane off Sardar Patel Road. Tap’s face was flushed; he had obviously enjoyed every moment, just I’d known he would. I relented when he asked for a go at the bike.

Alas! Tap was completely overwhelmed, poor chap, at finally getting to ride his dream bike. He kicked and kicked and kicked, but it simply refused to start. Both of them had got the jitters, it seemed. I finally took pity on Tap and prised him away from the bike by gently reminding him that there would be other times. It was getting late, and

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we had to go all the way back to New Friends Colony. I dropped him back, and four years passed before we met again.

I had come to know Tap had joined Dunlop, the tire company. His aptitude always lay in the automotive sector, but those were pre-liberalization days. The passenger automobile segment, the only one that interested him, consisted of only three companies: Hindustan Motors, that produced the evergreen AmbassadorAmbassador, the now-defunct Premier Automobiles that sold an antique version of a Fiat, the Premier Padmini, Padmini, and Standard Motors, who made the flimsy ‘HeraldHerald’.. He detested all three. His father owned a Standard VanguardVanguard, a fast, three-gear English car with overdrive in top.

Tap always raved about how he’d drive it at 60 mph on Red Road in Calcutta. The Calcutta I know, one can’t drive anything faster than 10 mph; everything in sight is dug up, and going anywhere means taking one detour after another. Apparently the city was to have a tube, which had already been christened ‘the Metro’. Without BMW, Daewoo, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Lotus, Mercedes, Mitsubishi, Opel, Skoda, Toyota, and Volvo like we have today, it was a grim scene in the auto sector...for the harried consumer.

Quality was a word that did not exist in the automakers’ lexicon. The only option left to Tap was to join Dunlop, the sole surviving multi-national tire maker in India, with its headquarters at Dum Dum, near Calcutta. But much time had passed since he had left college, he was now even flabbier and balding fast; he managed only a small front-office job. He didn’t mind; he was only marking time till…

Tap’s father passed away, and he swung into action. His two elder brothers were well established abroad, and wanted nothing from the inheritance since they never intended to return to India. So Tap netted a cool. fifteen million bucks from the sale of the Chanakyapuri house and bought a six-bedroom monstrosity in Rajouri Garden. When I last met him, he was preparing to move out of his tiny Masjid Moth rented flat with his plump, buxom wife and his three hyperactive daughters.

He dipped into his ample coffers and bought a black 1.8 liter Hindustan Motors ‘ContessaContessa’ car. Since I never saw him again, I guess he devoted himself full-time to his family and his cars. With such handsome swag in the bank, he certainly wouldn’t have stopped at just one set of wheels. I still try to peer through the tinted glass of every Mercedes or BMW I come across on Delhi roads, but I never did manage to get a glimpse of him. I suppose he has gone abroad to mop up yet another (God forbid) inheritance. I am reasonably sure that if I frequent the five-star hotels whose restaurants are doing the briskest business I’ll eventually locate him, tucking energetically into pricey victuals.

Tap’s charmed (and charming) life reminds me strongly of a Somerset Maugham story called ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, a take-off on one of Æsop’s fables of the same name. In case you don’t recollect Maugham’s tale, it revolves around two brothers; one is hardworking, abstemious, and leads a frugal existence, putting by small sums of money every month in a savings account for a rainy day. His younger brother, who often feels the sharp edge of his elder sibling’s tongue, is a gay blade, a handsome, swashbuckling ne’er-do-well who lives off lonely older women who frequent the playgrounds of the rich that dot the Mediterranean. His elder brother predicts that he’ll land in the gutter when age catches up with him and his charm and good looks depart.

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But in the end, it is the younger one that has the last laugh; it so happens that he marries a rich old lady who dies suddenly, leaving her vast fortune in his hands.

I wished Tap luck. He was such a fine bloke at heart. I also like to believe there was much method in his madness, and he played his cards as well as Maugham's Riviera gigolo. I hope he lives happily ever after…I feel he deserves it.

I also like to think that Tap’s father knew exactly what he was doing when he promised him the bike. That promise was a powerful piece of motivation that got Tap through five years of college. I don’t think anything else would have made him endure it, for he was not academically inclined (to put it mildly). A wise father, who obviously had a keen insight into his son’s psyche, made a promise he intentionally dishonored for the sake of his son. There was no way he was going to let Tap loose on an unsuspecting Delhi astride a powerful machine like the Enfield Bullet.

Taposh was the only son left to the old, nearly sightless and dying man, and he sensed that his youngest child was too simple-minded to survive in the harsh and unforgiving environment of the outside world. He tied up everything—the Will, lawyers, tax angle, everything. Only when everything was sewed up watertight did he let go of life, tired but happy that at least one Roy Chowdhury remained in India to carry on.

From beyond the Void, he reached out to the last of his blood and set him up in style, to ensure that his descendants never had to face the severe privations he had himself endured in his early years of struggle and sacrifice. I salute that far-sighted and thoughtful parent. I don't think Tap ever realized how lucky he was to have him for a father. His dad was his saviour: Tap would have perished without his legacy, for he had no saleable talents whatsoever—and biotechnology labs needed specimens with smaller appetites and bigger returns on investment. Still, the earth would have been a much poorer place if he hadn't come a'visiting.

***subroto mukerji***

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