Tension (Part 2)

January 19th, 2010
Tuesday
Chennai, India

Dr. Narayan woke up and looked at the rising sun outside, stretching his arms. 6 am in the morning. He bathed and at 6:30 am, he started his Dirga Pranayama . At 7 am, Prabhavati, his wife, served him his breakfast – 4 idlis and sambhar. “Meenakshi eno endrikilaya? (Hasn’t Meenakshi woken up yet ?)”, he asked his wife. “Illai, vare vare, rhomba somberi ahra. Adhuka mella, nethu rathri sapidivai illai. Aval odai enna sairetha’nt therilai (No, she has become increasingly lazy lately. In addition, she didn’t even eat last night. I don’t know what to do with her)”, complained Prabhavati. Dr. Narayan didn’t respond.

At 7:30 am, he took his packed lunch from his wife and made his way down to his red Maruti 800 car of 10 years, to head to IIT Madras where he was Professor of Mathematics. To the casual observer, he seemed calm and poised. But today, his mind was troubled.

“This younger generation”, he kept thinking to himself. “This younger generation…when will they learn !”, as he drove slowly down Elliot’s Beach road. “It all started with those economic reforms in 1991”, he thought to himself. “That was what unleashed this beast of materialism. That was when he started noticing people buying things they had no need for. Big cars, flashy mobile phones, huge television sets…why, now, people were buying some kind of Satelitte Navigation systems to tell them how to get to places !...if they had been living in Chennai for any reasonable period of time, how could they not know the way to these places !”, he grimaced.

“Probably, the most damaging aspect of opening up our economy has been the advent of Satelitte Television”, he thought to himself as he passed the traffic lights and entered Sardar Vallabhai Patel Road. “That was what introduced these youngsters to this notion of individual freedom…the freedom to shape every aspect of one’s life according to one’s own whims and fancies!”, he snorted. “They were demanding the right to choosing their life partners now! That is what you get when you begin thinking of the individual as the basic unit in society, rather than the family – you get this romantic Western notion of marriage. Didn’t they realise that, the basic unit of society is in fact the family ? Didn’t they know it wasn’t so much about how good the two spouses were together, but about how good they were as parents ? Wasn’t it this emphasis that ensured the continuity of the species?”

“All because of blindly following Western culture”, thought Dr. Narayan, making a dismissive gesture with his hand.

Now, his brow furrowed as his thoughts became more personal. “My very own Meenakshi is seeing that Christian boy, Philip”, he thought sadly. “It will simply not do, she does not know what is good for her…”

“I have arranged for Dr. Srinivasan’s son, Ramesh, to come and meet her on Saturday. He has come down from the USA and is looking for a bride. He has a good software job back in the US, and most importantly, is a good Brahmin boy. What more could Meenakshi ask for! Admittedly, she seemed distraught when I told her about this appointment. But she is a good girl and will not go against my wishes. Eventually, she will see the wisdom of my words. Once he meets her and wants to marry her, as I’m sure he will, we can arrange for the wedding after she completes her degree this year.”, he thought satisfiedly as he turned into the vast IIT campus.


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Philip was tense. Something wasn’t quite right. Meenakshi hadn’t called since yesterday which was unlike her. He told his mother he was going out, went to his garage, mounted his motorbike and made his way to Saravana Bhavan (a South-Indian vegetarian restaurant) off 12th main road, Anna-nagar. He reached Roundtana and turned left, glancing up at the huge Vodafone billboard, Rahul Dravid’s image smiling back at him.

Onto the main road and into the chaos and cacophony of the traffic. He loved it like this. Expertly, he weaved his way in and out of the traffic, using his motorbike’s manouevrability to the maximum. Autorickshaws, share-autos, other motobikes, the odd bicycle, old cars, new cars, all part of his peripheral vision and then disappearing as he sped past them. It was mid-day and Anna-Nagar was packed. He impatiently rode behind a bus, before accelerating past it, sneaking through a gap between the side of the bus and the side of the road. He could hear the bus-driver swearing at him. “Man alive, I love this !”, he grinned sheepishly.

He reached Saravana Bhavan and dismounted, taking off his helmet. Up the stairs and into another self-contained world of chaos. The lunch-time rush was in full swing. The air was filled with the smell of food – food made of dough, lots of oil, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, curd, chillies and many, many spices. Two ceiling fans with 4 blades each ran at full throttle, to ventilate and to ward off flies. On the far end, a huge garlanded portrait of the restaurant’s founder hung on the wall. In the restaurant were mostly men, a few women, lower-class and middle-class, sitting, eating, shouting, ordering, sipping, burping. Since there was no space, two or more groups were sharing tables. Most of the men were dressed in simple clothing, a normal trouser and a cotton shirt, not tucked into the trouser. The women in sarees, but the inexpensive kind. The waiters ran hurriedly from table to table, now shouting out orders to the cooks, now serving a customer, now cleaning a table that had just been cleared.

Philip took an empty seat at a table being used by a pleasant-faced gray-haired man who hardly noticed the intrusion. He beckoned his waiter-friend Saravanan and ordered an onion-roast. Leaning back onto the spine of the chair, he tried to collect his thoughts. “What was it that was bothering him…”

“It isn’t so much that she hasn’t called”, he thought to himself, “but even yesterday, at the beach, she seemed pre-occupied. She mentioned that she had something on her mind…why wouldn’t she tell me what it was?...”. “Could she be seeing someone else?”, he suddenly started, then relaxed, “she wasn’t that kind of girl”.He remembered how she had told him that there could never be another guy. Another time, she had told him that her parents would want her to have an arranged marriage, but assured him that she would have none of it.

His face broke into a goofy grin as his mind wandered to the first time he had noticed her. They had been in the same class for a year, doing their Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology, but he hadn’t taken note of her during the first year. The college granted you demerit points for talking to girls, so it was best not to even think about them. Girls and boys did talk, but it was always with a vague fear of being caught and reprimanded.The restrictions were only relaxed during college cultural festivals, when everybody had to organise the festival together. It was during the festival in the 2nd year that he had first noticed her. She had been in charge of introducing the Chief Guest, and was dressed in a green saree for the occasion. Man, how irrepressibly feminine she had looked in that saree! Those long eyelashes, her long plaited hair, but more than anything, the grace of her movements and expressions. She was in her element in that saree. She was a quintessentially Indian girl and she could only completely become herself in a quintessentially Indian dress. He had been captivated.

She completed him. He instinctively felt that she provided something that had been missing in his liberal Christian upbringing. All the other girls he knew, from his school and from his church, had been products of this liberal tradition. They were confident, fun girls, strong in their belief of equality of the sexes. But in believing this, somewhere, they had forgotten the essential complementarity of the sexes. Meenakshi hadn’t forgotten that. She was confident, progressive, modern, yet utterly and totally feminine…he loved her.

“Saar, your onion-roast is getting cold!” barked Saravanan close to Philip’s ear. “Oops! Thanks Saravanan”, responded Philip embarassedly, “I was thinking about someone..erm..something else”. Philip tore a bit of the onion-roast, dipped it in the sambhar and started thinking about applications for his M.S. degree in the US.

“I’ll apply to John Hopkins University”, he thought excitedly “Wasn’t that where Nandan Nilekani applied?”. Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys, the software company, was his idol. “Imagine how much I’ll learn from there, the quality of training I’ll get!”.”Then, I’ll come back to India and start my own IT firm. I’ll be a part of the Indian growth story. But my activities won’t just be confined to IT – I’ll be an environmentalist, I’ll start a school…I’ll be an agent of change, I’ll make a difference”, he thought to himself. “When I write my autobiography, I’ll dedicate it to Meenakshi…”, his thoughts faltered as he realised how much a part of his plans Meenakshi was. He needed her more than anything else. She would be his source of support, strength, she would always be there to listen to him, chastise him when he made a mistake, counsel him, love him…”God bless Manmohan Singh”, he thought, as his thoughts gained momentum again. “Without the economic reforms he introduced in 1991, what would budding IT entrepreneurs like me do!”, he thought, finishing his roast and paying his bill.

He got on his motorbike and ran his fingers through his hair before putting his helmet on. He smiled to himself as he remembered how Meenakshi teased him about the way he ran his fingers through his hair – Rajni Kanth style she called it, referring to a famous Tamil film actor. He started his bike and headed home.

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