Chapter 1

The Professional Protestor


"What was it….yes! I am never going to let time trick me into growth. I am
never going to let time trick me into growth. I am never going to let
time trick me into growth… "Leiserl muttered as she ploughed her way
through the crowd. That was the mantra she coined last night
before she was sucked into sleep by the irresistible pull of the marijuana
Arjun had brought from Manali. It was when she kicked the clock that it
burst into alarm, three hours after it was set to go off.

"Chalo," she said, after she got into the autorickshaw. The driver
reacted the same way the alarm clock did when she kicked it in her
sleep. He rolled away in the direction it was facing.

"I’d bloody well make it."

The rickshaw turned into the main street towards the railway
station. Though it was one in the afternoon, the sky over Bombay’s
central suburb of Chembur remained a vast grey canvas occasionally
punctured by a patch of bleached yellow. Evidence that the sun had not yet
scooted for the day.

At Diamond Garden the signal was yet to turn green. The trucks were
already bullying in from outside town, their tarpaulins still dripping the
fresh rain wasted on them at the Sahyadri Ghats on their way into the
city from Pune. Leiserl’s auto driver had neatly wedged his bedbug-like
auto along a Ashok Leyland truck, whose snarling jaw had
obviously been broken several times.

The bug-like vehicle had its front wheel kissing the back of a Honda.
The driver was so busy trying to catch whatever he could of the plump
thigh of the girl riding pillion on the bike, that he did not even hear
the choice abuse showered from the truck driver’s cabin like the
splatter of paan.

The auto burst into the gravelly roar of a Lion with a severe cough, and tried to manouvre right past the Honda which sped off like a bullet, and the rest of the yellow striped black bugs moved to the station in their unique three-wheeled demonstration march. Leiserl got off, paid and was in the ladies’ compartment before the train pushed the platform away.

When she got off at Victoria Terminus, now Chhatrapati Shivaji
Terminus, she was busy, her head buried in her yolk yellow cloth bag.
She was looking for the literature about Depo Vera.

"Hell! I have got only the damned Narmada Bachao Andolan pamphlets with me. Damn, damn, damn!" The NBA was a high profile movement, protesting the building of the Sardar Sarovar dam over the Narmada river, led by the charismatic former professor of sociology, Medha Patkar. Miss Patkar is one of the most intriguingly sexy icons of modern India. She looked perennially unbathed, in a country where bathing twice a day is
considered normal, even in all her appearances on television and the press.
But she held an amazing sway on the imaginations of both those displaced
by the dam she was fighting to abolish, and on those who had nothing to
do with the dam, had wives and husbands, and found enough time to leer
at television images.

When Leiserl stepped outside the gothic station, the sun pierced her eyes and she banged right into a policeman.

"Madam, please watch where you are going."

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry," she went on muttering, still head and two
hands firmly inside the cloth bag. The crowd was dense, the muck on her
feet had already crept between her toes, over the straps of her sandals,
merrily invading her tickle zones, but her hands were yet to find
anything on Depo Vera. In frustration she kept pulling at the pamphlets
as if she were pulling her own hair, and soon she had strewn the
road half way to Hutatma Chowk with the pamphlets on NBA that she had.


Her cloth bag had turned into a magician’s hat. The pamphlets wouldn’t
stop coming from in there, and she wouldn’t stop strewing the road
with the NBA literature when she found the cops and the protestors
getting restive. Just as she waded into the crowd, her crowd, the cops
pulled the girl next to her. She held her back, abusing
the cops. The scuffle got the other cops closing into the crowd of
women and a few men who were protesting the controversial female contraceptive.


Leiserl found herself with seventeen others in the familiar
police van, accompanied by the khaki clad policewomen. As
the purple and yellow Bombay police van started to speed, Leiserl, seated
at the back, leaned over to look at the back tyre. The policewoman
pushed her head back in. After some time, turning through
the traffic towards the Cuff Parade police station, she again jerked her
head to look at the tyre.

’Kya karta hai tum?" the policewoman asked agitated.
"Arre. Gaadi ka number dekhna hai."
"What," the policewoman was startled." This is a police van, not
a stolen vehicle.”
"I know. But I want to see the registration number all
the same."
"MH-O1_2734"
"Aaah. Thank you"
That was the seventh time in six months that she had been huddled into a
police van for protesting one issue or the other, and Leiserl wanted to
know how many times she had traveled in this one. Thrice already.

"I am never going to let time trick me into growth. I am never going let
time trick me into growth, I am never going to let time trick me into
growth."

"Your name?" the head constable on duty asked without the slightest
interest.
"Iamnevergoingtolettimetrickmeint ogrowth..."
"Your name?" the constable raised his voice automatically, not noticing
that before him was a girl of extraordinary beauty … years of life in
the constabulary had blinded him.

The first thing that most people noticed about Leiserl was her
vast forehead. Her hair seemed to have been planted into her scalp as an
afterthought. It began its wild growth full five inches above her
lush brows. And, it grew like an untended weed garden, caught into a
clumsy clasp at the end by a band that had lost its elasticity a
couple of years ago. She was darkish, but not dark enough. Her eyes had
a wild intelligence and an odd uncommitting kind of sympathy. Her nose was long and slender, but not quite right on a woman’s face. It seemed like
a sheathed dagger, hiding in the elegance of its shape, a lethal sharpness.

"Leiserl Mephisto’
"What?"
"L-E-I-she began to spell it.

. *********

"I am never going to let time trick me into growth, Ell"

Ell nodded. He moved towards the end of the dark room, where a silver
flicker announced a live monitor. As the eye got accustomed to the
general darkness of Ell’s one room armory of language, one could see
a more steady and sharp tongue of blue, tinged with a red flame. The coffee was boiling by the time Ell negotiated his way past the piles of books, unruly heaps, like in a godown raided by fierce invaders. Just before he reached the stove, he gently kicked a tome that had strayed from the edge of the heap into his narrow way, and the sudden movement had a lizard fleeing for life into the heap.

" That’s what I thought about last night, that’s going to be my motto.
Never let time trick you into growth."

Ell remained passive, pouring the black coffee into the mugs with
exaggerated care. He then picked up the two mugs with hot coffee, and
turned back with the steely determination he would require to reach
Leiserl with the two mugs, all of ten feet away.

"Everybody just lives. After a few years they claim to have grown up,
just like trees. Years of pushing death away cannot be growth," she said
half meditatively. "I do not want to be a tree."

Ell finally tip-toed to where Leiserl was on her tummy, her longish white
T-shirt had been pulled up above her rounded and tight butt. Her legs
were apart and bent at her knees, and her heels slapped her bottom in a
slow rhythm. Left first, then right, as if the soft slaps were her way
of nudging her thoughts.



She was in very deep thought. In fact so immersed in her thoughts was she that she did not feel that her right heel was not punching softly into her denim. The right heel was being brought down on her rump, exposed like an outsized smile, though the tears in her jeans, like that of a Halloween mask.

Ell too did not notice. After a little struggle, like a dog trying to sit without landing on its tail, he clumsily arranged to sit cross legged near her head, and without spilling the coffee he had in both his hands.

He placed the cups down.

"You know the only proof of my childhood are the cuts on my knees and
elbows..." said Leiserl and she trailed off. Maybe she let it look like
she had trailed off. She pushed her hands back, and pulled off her
headband, liberating her wild hair like a tossed mane. Only, her hair
always bobbed up violently with all the suppressed energy of unruly curly hair. It flew in all directions, but effectively drew a curtain over her feelings and her loud thoughts. Her hair now covered her face from view, and the gentle darkness of the room lapped up all around it.

Ell merely looked on. In fact, his was a habit of concentrating all the
meagre light of the room onto his visage by sheer passivity. The thick
glasses he wore of unknown vintage seemed to be his window of
communication to the world. They often exaggerated the milky twinkle of
his eyes when he was excited, and when he was subsumed in his own
silence, they exaggerated the emptiness of the gloom within the room.

Leiserl took a minute to gather herself. She seemed to be in some kind
of silent communication herself. But, just as her dips into silences were sudden, her turnarounds were dramatic. One toss of her mane, and her face glowed in the faint light of Elle’s abode. Its capacity to reflect and capture the meagre light of Elle’s gloomy room was always a little more than Elle’s glasses-aided greed.

He pushed the coffee mug closer to her. Turning on her side she tilted
away from the cup, softly turning away from it, drew up her legs,
gathered them under her, and swayed to plant herself crossed legged
on the floor. Her face was wiped completely clean of any shadows of the
worry or anxiety she was battling a moment ago.

"So, how are you doing in your battle for silence, Ell?"

"Being tricked."

Leiserl laughed a soft laugh that immediately magnified the dull light
in the room.

Theirs had been an odd friendship. In the whole world, she
might have been the only person who knew what Ell’s way of finding meaning in life was all about. She knew that he was in the habit of collecting books on language. Ell was not into learning languages. Quite the opposite. His was an attempt to reject it. It was communication that he was seeking to
decode. How was it that so many languages communicated.

The language of communication, not communication through language.
He was very convinced that there existed a code, a kind of charge, which
passed between two communicators. Two talkers.

"Whenever two persons talk, whether in Romanian, Latin, Greek or
English, they exchange information in a particular set of signifiers. These signifiers are often classed under different systems. The system they are classified under is a language. There are as many systems of communication as there are languages," he had said.

Leiserl understood Ell’s concerns. Or so he felt. She was the only person
who had ever walked into his dim-lit bachelor’s pad, on the first floor of a
grimy government building. The buildings all around his were also
greying behemoths that constantly looked like monsters straining inside
their individual prison cells.

They were full of tiny houses that poor families burst into, and tried
to make a home of, on the strength of the ambitions of their youngsters,
the bile of the oldest, the bitterness of the father and the mother,
and the tangy promiscuity of those overstaying due to delayed
marriages. Occasionally, their world of compact and tightly fitted
machinery, oiled by the grease of their individual and joint morbidity,
flashed into loud foul-mouthed fights. Cheap liquor was always a great
fuse on the the valve.

Leiserl too felt she understood Ell, and his concerns. But she was
aware that what she felt and understood of Ell, had little to do with his
understading of his own goals in life. In fact, what she felt she only wrote
down, and only in her diary. The entry on Ell said:

"Today I think I found an astral cousin of mine. And he was found in
places where such cousins of mine are to be expected. At the old
bookseller Hameed’s wayside spread. I was looking through the books
disinterestedly. I had time to kill. When I noticed this strange looking
man stopping near me. He had no eyes for anything but the books spread
out on the pavement."

He looked as if he was starving parts of his body, while overfeeding
others. He had unusually strong forearms. Flat and broad, but not
bulging, but the veins stood out like they could not handle the force of
blood in them. So prominent were they, they would have been varicose had
they been on the legs of a woman. Very hairy too. They jutted out like two
strong branches from under the sleeves of a shirt that had been
stretching at the seams for several years. Leiserl noticed that the
seams were connected by weaves of cloth like the teeth of a comb which
had every alternate one broken.

The shirt itself was orange. It must have been severely bleached through
overuse, for it took a keen eye to see that there were thin white
stripes. The top two buttonholes, were each widely open like the mouths of dead fishes. The third button was black sewn into its place with white thread. The next one was white, and the only other button had the yellowish off-white colour of a rotten tooth. There was no button in the last peg. The topmost button that latched was threatening to be wrenched out of its hole, straining, as if to contain the hairy barrel that was his chest.

His deep brown trousers were similarly tight, hugging him in the sticky
Korea gabardine. They had unfashionable side pockets, open mouths
rimmed with the grime of years. The pleatless front, tearing to pull
the zipper flap to the right and the left, went along down, hugging
his thin legs all the way till oversized feet thrust out of them just
under the funny bell bottoms. The oversized feet were in rubber slippers
that looked like they had stretched to be the size of the feet.

Leiserl thought of the young girls married to fat, huge hairy and well-fed
Arabs with bushy mustaches and assaulting perfumes that she saw often at the airport, heading towards the flight that took them to the gulf countries. The young girls would look like this man’s slippers within a month of their forced marriages.

But what struck her were the man’s thick glasses. They almost covered one
third of his bony face. His hair was wavy but glued in mid wave, like
the unwashed mane of those wretched horses on the beach. On any other
face the glasses would look like a circus mask purportedly to cover the
eyes, but effectively covering the entire face. There was a purple tinge
to the thick glass, which sucked into itself the entire landscape that
the eyes saw. In and around the glasses, with their thick bending twigs
for stems, the man’s parched face was unevenly shaved. His hair struck out in a defiant and unruly growth in patches all over. The fertility of his skin
was beyond doubt.
"He must have last mowed the area two or three days back.
And the weeds have already overtaken the mowed grass." She had thought.

The most remarkable thing for her, while she was drinking in his ugly
body, like a grotesque piece of carpentry, was that the man did not even
notice her. His vast nostrils were perhaps deceptive. His olfactories obviously did not work. But hers did. He reeked of mustard oil, like he’d had a shower in it.

eoc