A Drunken RSS Man in Jassema

Our bullet slipped into the lightly wooded outskirts of Goa as the lid on the day was tightening on March 22. We saw a few white tourists on mopeds and bicycles, lone riders, obviously familiar enough over time with the uncomplicated routes, if not the geography of the place. These were those who moved into Goa for longish periods, usually a fortnight to a couple of months, rented cheap accommodation with local families, and soaked in the sun, sand and surf of the glorious coastal state.

A little distance into Goa, before we hit the arterial road we saw a disconcerting sight. A moped had furrowed into the brambles off the kuccha road and was lying on its side. Next to that was the body of a white youth. He seemed to have surrendered to ganja before his moped lost control. He lay still. A few locals had gathered around him. From all accounts it was a small accident and he would live.

“Where should I go?” Rohan asked, once we hit a road that looked important enough to lead somewhere.

“Jassema Bar”

That was of course new to Rohan, and perhaps, to most people in Goa too. But it was a kind of Café de Flore for me because of it being such a cozy place, one that I had frequented with my friends in Panaji. The primary reason was geo strategic rather than quaint exotica. It was situated in a cool, uncrowded lane adjacent to the Times of India office in Goa, my first port of call in the city. Tony Abraham, who was the main Times man in Goa, was a friend.

“Hello Thomas, remember me?” I said cheerily, hoping the breezy tone would override 20 days of living in the sun, landing up totally messed up, with another messed up friend in tow, and each with a heavy backpack to park in his restaurant. Thomas was the man who ran the Jassema Bar with his mother and sister. And, fortunately, he was at the counter.

“Hi” said Thomas. He smiled, I think. That is what being part of a family that runs a friendly bar in Goa over the years does to you. You do not need to actually smile to mean friendly. Thomas is sumptuously built, tall, darkish. And above all, enigmatic.

“You had long hair when you came last time.”

“Yes.”

That is perhaps where the real secret of hospitality lies locked. My cheery introduction was an opportunistic exaggeration of friendliness; his half-smile was a most natural, unstrained recollection. Thomas, in many ways, embodied Goa’s spirit. He wore intimacy lightly. He made everybody welcome in a way that was in direct contrast to the welcome of an airhostess or shop floor salesman, who too welcome business with a face. There was in Thomas’s welcome a total disregard for the transactional value or its promise, in the customer.

It must be a supreme form of self-assurance, or supreme form of nishkama karma, the Geeta’s famous business of doing whatever you must righteously, not rightfully, do, without the remotest regard for consequences. Thomas made me feel like he was my longtime friend. He probably will be embarrassed if he reads this, but that is precisely his strength. The aura. The aura that people, characters, history speak of, about famous, physically, historically imposing personalities like the Russian mystic Rasputin, or Gandhi, or Einstein. Thomas had that aura of Goan susegad; and that was an easy, no-strings-attached intimacy. And we are not even in the antechamber of a deal.

Rohan was tired. There was little that I could do more than order a couple of chilled beers, after we had finished with the splashing of water routine to kindle another phase of the day. 350 kilometres in 12 hours on motorcycle leaves stains on the body and spirit that no amount of soap and water slaking of face and limbs can quieten.

“You really fell for her didn’t you?”

I was speaking of the stunning Karwari woman we had seen at a small village kiosk along the highway. We had stopped for a smoke break, and this woman had landed up at the same stall from somewhere nearby. She was probably a farm labourer. She wore a mustard yellow saree, and was of regular height. Her built was the lean, mean, hungry kind, a kind of sparse body that would have been wiry in a man. It was her face that was like the blow of the hammer directly into the iris; even if our irises were tired and dimmed by nine hours in the sun. She had golden burnished skin, a well-formed, sleek, unobtrusively long nose that burst into a florid flare from the false diamond that she had in her nose ring.

Her eyes, not large and expressive, but neither beady and penetrative; they were rather averagely ineloquent eyes. But the lashes, they were speckled with dust visible in the lighted shade of the late afternoon, made her eyes mesmerising. And yet what really took our half deadened senses away from the death to the ringing reality of this woman’s beauty was the streak of red that glistened on her slim lips with impossible, almost painterly sensuousness. And then the beetle juice trickled from the left corner, instantly killing two men with one trickle. One stupid enough to be seasoned, the other seasoned enough to be stupid.

Rohan took some time to exhale his smoke, and then gave way in a croaking nicotine smoke burst. He insisted he wanted to have a tender coconut after his smoke. It was that woman that I was talking to Rohan about after we had settled into our comfortable seats in Jassema.

“Maa kasam, meri shaadi nahi hoti na, meiN wahi pe reh jaata”

I would have stayed back in that village for her, if I were not married.

“Dath teri ki, Photu lena mangta tha na? We would have had her face forever with us. Nobody in Bombay will believe we saw somebody prettier than Aishwarya Rai in a village in Karwar.” The memory sparked new interest and energy in Rohan.

He started to perk up. The beer was cooling him, and he was warming up to the talk of ethereal highway beauties. Tony called to say he would be out of his office in five minutes.

“You know we think these women are easy. We had gone to Karnala in Rajesh’s Mitsubishi Lancer, and we stopped to take a leak. It was monsoon, and nobody could hold their bladders. While we were taking a leak we saw Rajesh getting damn horny over a woman labourer who was working on the road repairing. When the others saw her, we realised why Rajesh got so horny. She was a bomb. Tall, lithe, and with solid sharp features.” Rohan continued from where he had left. Karnala, a wooded bird sanctuary just outside Bombay, is a favourite picnic spot.

“And then?”

I prompted. From Rohan’s talk through the trip, and earlier conversations, I knew his friend Rajesh to be a rich man’s son. And a known rake. He was the stud boy of the group, and he had the money to bankroll him through his conquests. But, above all else, I thought that Rohan and others in his group were a little envious about Rajesh’s raw guts. Especially when it came to women. He propositioned a lot, and had an unusually high hit rate.

“Well, you know Rajesh. He went close to where she was and actually asked her whether she would go with him for a ride.”

“Holy shit, kya bolra hai?” What are you saying, in Bombaiyya Hindi.

“Sacchi, lekin phir sunn na. You know what the woman said?” Really, but listen then what happened.

“No, tell me.”

“She put down her tagara, (the iron container used to carry mixed building mortar at construction sites), and maloom kya boli?” Know what she said?”

“No”

“Boli, beta tu jitna moot ta hai na, utna toh mera aadmi galta hai.”

Son, my husband ejaculates as much as you pee.

‘Rajesh ka mooh dekhna chahiye tha re…..ey.” Rajesh’s face had to be seen.

This was typical Rohan. He was a great source of street language for me. His earthiness and the taste of cordite in his language when he was excited while narrating his subaltern experiences. I am acutely aware of a lack of familiarity, an easy familiarity in any case, with that kind of directness and grit of street language. Even when I knew the vocabulary, it was a passive vocabulary. I was never confident about it. Because where I grew up, the language was different. South Gujarat’s pidgin Hindi, or the biting sourness of its many Gujarati swear words I knew. It, however, did not constitute a subaltern language on its own right. Unlike Bombay’s street language which is more layered, complex, rich and with polyglot influences that give it greater tonal range. Besides, the regular usage in real time, in real situations rarely happened with me.

Rohan’s colourful narrations often brought to mind Ben Johnson’s quote about how normal language cannot ever match the directness of street language, ‘nothing brings out the futility of argument so directly as the street word jawing.’

“Hai beedu log…kaisa hai? Fucking biking trip and all haaN” Tony interjected as he invaded the table from behind me. Hugs handshakes over, he sat down apologising for being late etc. Jassema was getting noisy by the hour. Not a boisterous noise, but conversational noise steadily thickening, punctuated occasionally by a raised voice, was slowly rising like a palpable mist right in the centre of Jassema.

I introduced Rohan to Tony, “He is also a Chembur ka Chokra,” I said.

“Arrey kya baat hai, kidhar?” Rohan asked Tony.

“Apun Chheda Nagar ka hai.”

“I am from Maitri Park, yaar.”

Tony then said that a common friend, Jagdish, had gone off to Sawantwadi on a sales trip. He had called, and Tony told him I was in town. Jagdish said he would try to reach as soon as possible from Sawantwadi. Sawantwadi was the southern most district of Maharashtra, edging Goa, and Jagdish was a sales representative for Godrej, an FMCG major.

“Loretta will be coming too.” Loretta was Tony’s wife, and the better of half of a demon dancer couple.

While we chatted about this and that, Rohan said he would go off to check the internet. Besides, he wanted to call up home.

It was at that moment that a man called out to Tony from across the bar. Tony turned, went up to him, and they chatted there for some time. After a few minutes, Tony’s friend, Nagaraj, joined us at our table. He had been beering for sometime, and it showed.

“Hello, I am Nagaraj.”

“I am Harish.”

As we started talking, Nagaraj decided to check some of his interests against mine. He asked me if I knew of somebody. I said no, I did not.
“Arrey, how can you not know. You have not heard of him. He is Bangalore’s top underworld don.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Tony told me you are a crime reporter. You should know about him, no?”

I told Nagaraj that I had given up crime reporting long back. And was currently on a bike tour. This was the last leg. We were headed for Bombay. Tony winked at me, sitting next to Nagaraj across the table, perhaps enjoying my embarrassment, and my attempt to switch the topic.

“Oh, accha.”

The TV was on at Jassema. The chatter was rising. The quaint bar’s bric-a-brac lined on its walls, huge shells, old bottles of old liquor or vintage wine, all seemed to be placed there to ensure that the warmth stayed inside the bar. Nagaraj abruptly turned the topic.

“What is happening in Gujarat is really sad. Inhuman.”

“Yes. I have not been following the news, though.”

“But you know, it is all the fault of the leadership. The Muslims never had a good leader.”

Nagaraj was serious, I realised.

“Why do you say that?” I was not in the mood to do much talking. Besides, Nagaraj seemed to be just looking for something to argue about.

“Look, is it not true that they have remained uneducated for so many years now. They want to continue to live in the dark ages. They do not want to adopt population control. Why? Because their religion does not allow it. They want to marry more than one woman. Why? Because their religion allows it. They want to have separate laws for their people, why because their religion says so.”

Tony’s cell phone rang, and he excused himself, and got up. Jassema by now was not amenable to soft telephone conversations.

“You seem to be talking like the RSS,” I said, mostly to wiggle out of the conversation, and yet not seem unwilling to talk.

“No. No. But what do you have against the RSS? I love the RSS. Have you been with the RSS?”

“No,” I said. I was getting a distinct feeling that the conversation might get out of hand. I tried to douse the chat with monosyllables.

“No No. I have been with the RSS. In Belgaum. I was good yaar. I was leader material.”

“Accha,” I said. It would have been better if we talked about his life and achievements than RSS.

“They build character. They teach you to be proud of our culture. They do a lot of social work.”

“Yes, I know about their social work. In fact in Kandla, when it was hit by a cyclone, I saw many RSS volunteers who moved around helping people. They also carried kerosene and burnt the rotting bodies they found. They did good work there.” I realised I was fighting in our conversation like somebody trying to get rid of a gum that is stuck to the seats of one’s pants.

Nagaraj went quiet. I was relieved. Tony came back, and said that Jagdish would not make it. He would have to check into a hotel in Kudal.

“Why don’t you go to Kudal. It will be easier to reach Bombay from there. It is only 100 kilometres from here, besides it will be a peaceful ride in the night. The way is safe. He wants to meet you,” Tony said.

“Why not order something for me here first. Our man Rohan should be coming. I will check with him. After all he has to do the riding, and we have had a tiring day.”

Tony ordered a chicken kafrial for us. Special orders to Thomas got us the best that was made that day in Goa. Rohan joined us just then.

“You are a secularist,” Nagaraj interjected all of a sudden. He probably felt left out of the commotion at the table, and was still trying to hold on to our rather skewed discussion.

“No I am a journalist.” I told him.

“Yes, yes, that is the same, na?” My subtle attempt at setting the record straight was met with unusual fury. Nagaraj smacked it straight back into my face.

Tony heard that, and started laughing. Nagaraj briefly jolted into alertness, and then slipped back into a pensive mood.

“But this is serious,” he said, “we have to solve this problem.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“This Hindu Muslim one.”

I was getting exasperated with the talk. Somehow we were not making much headway. There was no cogency; Jassema was not very conducive to a serious discussion on the merits of the RSS or the Hindu Muslim problem. But, somehow, Nagaraj did not see it that way. The beer must have been good.

In the meantime, Rohan and I decided we would move on to Kudal. It was better that way, because then we could reach Bombay the next night. Otherwise, we would have to spend another night away from home.

“One more beer?” I asked Rohan. He refused. He had to ride, and did not want to drink anymore. And we would have to leave soon. It was already 11 in the night.

Having decided to ride into the night, I snapped back into alertness. Or so I thought. I thought I should reward Nagaraj with a decent closure, since he too sensed that we were planning to leave.

“So what are you in the RSS?”

“Nothing. I left. They prefer brahmins, so I left. I could not move up the hierarchy.”

We ordered dinner, and moved out into the road where our motorcycle was parked. While dinner was being readied, Rohan and I packed our bags back on to the carrier of our Bullet. Nagaraj slipped back into a pensive mood. He had a faraway, glazed look as he stared into his beer mug.

We had dinner, and the conversation was now mostly between Tony, Rohan and me. Tony was a Syrian Christian from Kerala married to a Goan Catholic. They were neighbours in Bombay, Loretta and Tony. After some years in Bombay with the Times of India’s response department he had chosen to move to Goa and handle the paper’s marketing in the state. They did not have an edition, but there was a tag-along Goa supplement in the Bangalore edition of the paper that was distributed in Goa. Tony had had several years in Goa’s easygoing life. And was beginning to feel that he might lose the professional edge if he remained pickled in the salubrious state’s famed susegad, the Portuguese word that was often used to convey the state’s all pervasive take-it-easy policy. The locals often hated it, the tourists loved it. It was much like the exotica of a country peddled only among the outsiders. Goans always fought the use of the word to describe their state by others. They connected it to all its negative connotations; laziness, lack of work ethics, general stupor. Those who use it, mean it in its more positive form: easy going, relaxed, and unharried.

“So how is your sister?” I enquired. Tony’s sister was a teacher. She had married a Bangladeshi Muslim and had moved to Dacca.

“She is fine. Making money. Teaching is very lucrative there in Bangladesh, yaar.”

Some more chitchat, and it was time to say goodbye. Nagaraj had slunk away from the conversation. I felt I should not let him feel that I was not attentive to his ideas. So after the goodbyes were over, I asked Nagaraj what was the solution to the Hindu-Muslim problem.

“Should we pack them off to Pakistan?” I was hoping it was a funny question and Nagaraj would get the clincher before we parted.

“If my brother is mad, I do not throw him out of my house. Do I?” He looked at me defiantly. The booze, whatever other feelings he was slowly churning in his head, the various ideas that were randomly laid out on the table by him, all coalesced into a look of deep pain. His eyes were speckled in fierce glints of pain and alarm. It was as if he was actually living with the situation of his metaphor of the family and the deranged brother.

The drunken RSS man suddenly jerked me back. All of a sudden I felt sympathy, even empathy for him. He was certainly not a man to be judged that night. He spoke randomly, made some ideological points from the RSS perspective, but so scattershot that I did not take him seriously. He was also not somebody who was much of an ideologue. But that parting shot from him made me look at him in a light different from what he had seemed inside Jassema that night. It was when the he used the family metaphor for the Hindu-Muslim situation that he seemed to have come into his own.

We finally wheeled into a hotel in Kudal. We could not locate the hotel where Jagdish had checked in, and Rohan just rolled into the first hotel with an open gate he saw. We were dead on arrival, the night out in Goa had ensured that. We woke up late the next day and promptly started on our journey back home. Another tough ride; we were still about 400 kilometres away from home.