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Bravado

 

Past midday the sea is at low tide, more froth than fury. There are, however, a few brave tourists standing gamely in the water, the men with their pants rolled up to their knees. A road with car and bicycle traffic runs up to the beach. On that road, about a kilometer and a half inland, there stands a single-storied flat-roofed structure. The building is an Inspection Quarters, belonging to the Post & Telegraph department. The outer compound has a rusting iron gate that swings open with pronounced lethargy.

A feeble man with only a tattered black cloth wrapped around his waist, an aluminum can hanging from his wrist opens the iron gate, walks up to the building door, and shouts in Oriya that he would like some food.

A lady in a blue saree emerges. Since it is a working day afternoon, her husband has gone back to work after lunch. She is carrying some cooked temple rice leftover after lunch.

"You are not a Muslim, are you?" the old man asks the lady. He hasn't eaten in quite a while but he prefers to be sure nevertheless.

"No, I am not," she tells him, shaking her head to emphasize her answer. She waits until the man takes the food and leaves the compound before returning to her quarters. The unexpected audacity of a street beggar surprises her, but this is Puri, one of the four holy Dhams of Hinduism, and maybe this is to be expected.

On the rooftop of the same building, there are two boys, the lady's sons. The rooftop is not the best of places to be when the sun is blazing, but the boys are on vacation and they have to make the best of the surroundings at hand. Fortunately, there is a guava tree, and even better, it has just begun to bear fruit. Light green ovals, hard on the outside, but a violent pink when bitten into.

Not more than hundred yards away, by the side of that same road, there is a gathering of about twenty-five onlookers witnessing a street magic show. In reality, though the crowd doesn't know it, it is not a magic show at all but a sales pitch, and the magician is no magician for the man is a master quack.

The two brothers, having had enough of the unripe guava fruit, slip out through the creaking iron gate to join the crowd surrounding the magician.

It was the summer of '78, our last year in Orissa. My age had just recently acquired an extra-digit. I was in fifth grade, and my brother was in the second grade. I was smitten with science, where I had learned that stars didn't in fact shine. I was giddy with the confidence of my imagined abilities. I was young, and full more of bravado than bravery.
         We had gone to the coastal town of Puri with our parents.
         Appa went to Puri from time to time to do an "Inspection" and the rest of us tagged along because there was a lot for a family to see and do in Puri. We were staying in the P&T Inspection Quarters, a guest house that would host families such as Appa's when they came to Puri under the pretext of official visits.
         It was not the Rath Yatra season, I know that much. During the Rath Yatra, there is an unceasing buzz in the air, and no visitor to Puri is allowed to forget even for a minute that the RathYatra is going on.
         I remember the temple pandas, as the priests in Puri were called. Pandas in their dirty white dhotis and a thin, pink towel draped around their necks. The reason I remember these fellows is for their irritating habit of rapping you on the head with two sticks, and to then have the audacity to demand a couple of Rupees from you for having blessed you thus. In the first place, I never wanted the blessings. Smarting at the blow to their heads, which hurts more in theory than in practice anyway, most pilgrims refused the payment and moved on. I wondered if maybe that refusal made the angry pandas rap the head of the next devotee slightly harder.
         That day, we had rice and dhal from the temple, the mahaprasadam, for lunch. Those humongus stacked clay cauldrons for preparing the rice are unique to the Jagannath temple. The devotees would always be amazed that the rice was somehow uniformly cooked in all seven stacked pots. I even recall that the rice had a special flavor to it -- was it cinnamon? clove? -- which made it impossible to forget that rice, served with dhal and some sabjis.
         I then claimed to my brother that I could climb the young guava tree in the compound, right next to the building. Guava trees have very smooth and hard trunks with barks that simply peel off, so they are not easy to climb. After my unsuccessful attempt, we found that we could take the stairs at the back to the IQ's terrace and easily get on to the tree from there. The guava fruit were small and not particularly sweet, but the difficulty in acquiring them made us want to treasure each one of them.
         That afternoon, a beggar boldly opened the gate and came into the IQ to ask for alms. He made his presence felt by shouting something, and Amma came out to give him some food. Amma was wearing a copper sulfate blue chiffon saree with black-and-white diamonds printed on it.
         I remember all of this because of the question the beggar asked.
         "You aren't a Muslim, are you?" he asked her before accepting the food. "No, I am not," she said, probably stunned by the question.
         He accepted the food and walked out.

Later, when Amma was asleep, and Appa was doing his inspection, Mukund and I walked just outside the IQ, and joined the circle of maybe twenty spectators. There was some kind of a street show and sale going on. The man in the center of the crowd was selling bottles of colored potions.
         The man called for a volunteer from the crowd and said he would demonstrate the power of his magic. He pulled a small boy of about my age into the center of the circle. The boy was wearing khaki shorts and no shirt. The man blew on the young boy's hand and placed it on the boy's cheek. He then blew on the boy's other hand, and placed it on the boy's groin. See, the boy's hands are glued now, the man told us.
         The man made a huge show of unsuccessfully prying the boy's hand away from his cheek. There is no way it will come off, he told us. Pointing to the boy's hand on his crotch, he said, and there is no way I am even going to touch there. The crowd laughed. I was annoyed that the crowd was buying his bull.
         Does anyone in the audience dare to let me cast my magic spell on you? The man asked. Before anyone could volunteer, he told us that he would not undo the sticking and that to separate the hand from the cheek, one would have to tear off the skin either from the cheek or the hand. He must have given this demonstration hundreds of times before, because he managed to systematically dismantle the disbelief among the onlookers. With every statement, he was able to drive the wedge of fear deeper in all of us.
         Come on, he taunted the crowd. Then, again without pausing, he told us that only the previous day a man got his hand stuck on his crotch and walked like this. He demonstrated with exaggerated splayed feet and the crowd roared. The hand had to be pried away because I didn't remove the magic, he told us. Once again he shouted out his dare. Does anyone in the audience want to challenge my magic spell?

Two years earlier, while in third grade, I had faced a similar situation. A replacement teacher showed up for a Social Studies class. This new teacher asked all of us eight-year-olds to correctly tell him India's Republic Day was, wanting the date and the year. I knew the answer, and maybe because I couldn't contain my enthusiasm, the teacher knew that I knew. He made all the students in the class stand and started asking them to answer. Instead of 26.1.1950, which I knew was the correct answer, and much to my disbelief they all started saying 15.8.1947 -- giving him the Independence Day instead. He would nod his head solemnly and make the student sit down and ask another. One by one, my classmates gave the exact same answer and he would make them sit down and move on. He asked all the students standing around me but deliberately left out asking me. I was on to his game. I was beaming inside with the anticipated joy of the moment when I would triumphantly blurt out the right answer. But he went on and on, there were more than thirty students and my doubts started. If I alone gave a different answer, I would be the only one who was wrong. Surely, I was not the only smart guy around, was I? I tried to read into the mind of this new teacher. Was he hoping to trick at least one of us into committing a mistake, or was he merely after the right answer? My doubts were getting stronger by the minute. I didn't know it then, but I was inside one of those dizzying Game Theory loops.
         Finally, I was the only one standing.
         He nodded to me.
         And like the others I, too, said 15.8.47.
         I could read the disappointment in his eyes. My self-doubt had won. No, that is the Independence Day, he told the class. The correct answer is Jan 26th 1950. I wanted to kick myself for having been so spineless.

Does anyone in the audience dare to test me while I cast my magic spell on you? the man asked again, but there were no takers in the timid crowd.
         I was this close to volunteering. I really was. I had just started to feel the power of science in the class and I didn't want blind superstition to triumph. I was champing at the bit. Mukund's hand was restraining me. He would've been horrified if I'd suggested that I was going to volunteer. Plus, we had both slipped out of the IQ compound while Amma was asleep and she would be furious if she even knew.
         Also, for all my imagined heroics, I was a little doubtful. There were all kinds of black magic rumors going around. What if something crazy happened? The poor guy was just trying to make some money. I didn't belong with these people. Reluctantly, I walked away hoping to fight ignorance another day. But I was more than a little ashamed of myself.
         After all these years, it still rankles me that I didn't stick to my answer or take up the charlatan's dare.
         But things were different then. It was a time when beggars could afford to be choosers, when I was young, and full more of bravado than bravery.

 

 


Ram Prasad
June 2002

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