Desi Train

He had always been troubled by the thought of the purpose of his existence. Teenage life saw him pouring through religious, theological books which tried their best to confuse the answer to the question. In adult life the pressures of making a livelihood took over. He realized the importance of burning ambitions and hard work and they took him places.

His personal life was in shambles though. In the U.S., with a good job, car and a rented home, having a debt of thousands of dollars, he had lost his path on the tracks which lead to many acts which made him – each time - squelch at the mere thought of having done so, but he was lost in the whirlwind and couldn’t find a way out, perhaps he had stopped searching for the way out. He saw himself, his entire life – as if a train built of many compartments – each compartment a phase of his life. He saw this train at work, one morning, on his desk. PS looked at his train, some good polished compartments, some battered ones, the ones at the end were hazy, as if enveloped in a fog…when he looked up to see…

S. Aravind requesting PS to sign his vacation application. S. Aravind, born and brought up in Hyderabad, went to Bangalore to do his engineering, partied hard with friends and moved with a few of them to do his Masters in Engineering in America. New cars, white women, sexy legs, and video games caused him to lose two semesters. Having struggled to get through his Masters, he found a company after much pain, which would sponsor his H1 Visa, working as a contractor for a few years. His elder brother and parents called him to Hyderabad, and arranged for him to get married. With his wife and a child, S. Aravind works under PS, goes home on time, takes wife and kids to the mall each evening, Saturdays they drive to the Malibu temple and though Aravind doesn’t know a bit about praying or chanting, he does sincerely pretend he is talking something to God at the temple. On other weekends they drive to San Diego or Disneyland. Aravind will return to Indian after 20 years, having lost his last held job, because the programming and technology he is experienced in, has long expired and outdated. Having had no ambitions to grow his career, his last job too, will be similar in title to the first job of his life. The difference would be a “Senior” in front his “Programmer” title. Aravind will spend the last few years of his life imagining what he could have been had he pushed harder to climb up in his career. Other times, he would repent and blame the causes of losing his son and his daughter – who now lives with a white man and has a baby out of wedlock – Aravind would blame all this on the American culture – the same at which he would angrily lash out, for making him lose his two semesters. Neither his son nor his daughter will have the time or the money to fly to India and perform the last rites, when S. Aravind passes away.

PS pays AJ the 4 bucks and 25 cents for the Marlboros. AJ is 58, though looks 70. Having arrived in the US 20 years ago, AJ lived as an illegal, hiding in the kitchen of the desi restaurant he worked for, for the first couple of years, until he was ready, legally, to received a citizenship of the U.S. With brothers and other elders in the family, who had kicked him out of his share of the farming property, AJ had left the village of Azamgadh in M.P.; crying and broken, with just a pair of clothes, the ones he wore, he walked all his way to Delhi where he worked with his cousins at a restaurant. In a few years he got an opportunity to escape to the U.S. with two of his colleagues. A few years later he accepted the fact that he escaped from one trap to enter another. At 58 with only two Indians he calls his friends; he is now a humorless, meticulous old man who sees PS buying a Marlboro every day. The only words they have exchanged so far is “Kaise ho?” since the last 4 years. AJ or Ajit Pal Singh will die of a stroke 7 years from now and his only existing friend will inform this sad news to the only family, he knows AJ has back in India - his two grand nephews. They will receive a phone call at their neighbor’s house and for the first 10 minutes after the phone call, they will have a hard time trying to recollect who AJ is. AJ’s only known relatives in India, his grand nephews, have exchanged a total of 3 letters with AJ, in the entire span of AJ’s life. AJ’s friend will use $ 567.90 cents to perform the last rites of AJ according to Hindu rituals. He will find the cash in AJ’s iron trunk and will use it to pay for the rites. The balance of $ 1432.10 of AJ’s money from the trunk, the friend will use to buy toys for his own grand children, a bottle of Black Label which he rarely got to drink in his life and two pairs of shoes. No one knows what happened to the $325,700.98 lying in AJ’s savings account.

PS spends some Sundays with RK, who had helped PS in his struggling days. RK was brought up in a middle class business family in Calcutta. He used to accompany his father to their cloth shop where as a kid he would observe his father use his family passed on marketing skills to sell fabrics to customers. With 4 brothers and 2 sisters, RK wanted to escape the grinding life he got to experience as a kid. By the time he turned 18, RK had this burning ambition to join one of his uncles in America. Finally arriving in the U.S. with his green card, he first works for his uncle, then quickly picks up the American-English, the American-way-of-selling and uses it to reach his dreams - his dreams of setting up his own business. Now having a chain of multiple stores which include selling Indian clothes, to stores which sell cell phones, RK used every opportunity which came his way. This included mixing well in the upper echelon of the Indian community, becoming an active member of the India club and on the way accepting the proposal to marry the daughter of a rich Indian business man who was impressed with RK and his growing career. Though RK had no love, no attraction on a physical, emotional or spiritual level he still married Radha, the businessman’s daughter, for the money, which he could see boosting his business expansion plans. On the way he made new friends, the young crops of programmers and engineers who landed in his city and needed an active social life on weekends, he gave Radha two kids, donated regularly to the Hindu temples around his city and took up drinking as a hobby. In 2007 on a foggy winter night, after a heavy drinking round with his so called “friends”, RK will drive his car into an oncoming oil tanker, his body without the seat belt on, will be thrown out of his car and his last thoughts will be of trying to escape the wheels of a passing vehicle from running over him. There will be a huge gathering to offer their last respects to RK at his residence. No one will notice a young woman in white, with her face partly covered by the dupatta, trying hard to control her tears. She will touch RK’s dead feet and leave. No one will notice the woman and if anyone does, they will never know who she was. Sheela will go back to working at the bank and never marry her entire life. The only love she ever felt, was for a man – she had a passionate secret affair with, for 5 years. The affair ended with the man’s death in a car accident. A picture of RK holding and kissing Sheela will be forever buried below many old sarees in a suitcase tucked far away in Sheela’s condo, bought for her by RK.

Bhaskar takes charge of PS’s car each time for servicing. He does that for every Indian who services their car at his garage. Bhaskar came to the U.S. like many others searching for a better life and making money. Being the greatest penny pincher PS has ever seen, Bhaskar started working at a garage and then worked his way up to buy it from his old Mexican boss. Bhaskar’s friends put up a part of the money and arranged the necessary loans required to buy the garage. Bhaskar is known to many Indians for excellent servicing of cars. But Bhaskar’s fleecing methods are completely unknown, hidden from them. On the pretext of being an Indian who helps Indians, he charges much more and orders unnecessary replacements or maintenance in their cars. Bhaskar is on fire, running, hard and fast to pay off all his business loans, so all the money earned, he can keep for himself. In this drive, Bhaskar ended up losing some genuine friends. 16 years from now, Bhaskar will find his hard earned money being spent on hospital visits to cure his blood cancer. Having never smoked a cigarette in his life, he will curse God and his destiny for having shelled out such bitter pills of life to him. Before his final breath, Bhaskar’s two sons will get him to sign his will to split whatever is left of his garage, equally between them. His daughter will be left out of the will. She will get nothing but only an abusive alcoholic husband, who will, for the rest of his life, scream at her and slap her on drunken nights, for not having pushed hard enough to get a share in Bhaskar’s garage. Bhaskar’s meek wife will end up shuttling between her two sons, eventually ending up being less of a mother and more of a housemaid and child-care provider, both non paying jobs at her sons’ homes. She will breathe her last while sitting next to the stove waiting for the milk to boil at her elder son’s two room apartment, overlooking Bhaskar’s old garage across the street.

In the last hour of Naina’s life, she will have a strange feeling to rewind and play her entire life in her mind. She will see herself growing up in India and arriving in the US when she was 12. Having embraced the American culture she would get bitter and abusive over the word ABCD used by other Indians on her. Naina will also become an armchair crusader of women’s rights amongst friends and family, never actually joining an organization as such. She will be a borderline women’s lib fanatic overlooking the fact that due to this nature of hers, she would end up losing friends both men and women in the process. Becoming a lawyer, losing her mother and now living with her Dad she will at times question herself in private over the mystery of not having a man in her life. Having slept with many men Indians and Americans, one abortion, 23 broken promises, 6 times when she walked out of a relationship because of her fanatic women’s lib view, she will find it hard to grasp the reasons on why she isn’t loved and has a family of her own. In public she will always put on the mask of “I don’t need a man” till the last day of her life. She will remember talking to PS on the phone, a call set up by her father who found PS on an online Indian marriage site. Naina will never know the reason or understand why she told PS, that she wasn’t interested in getting married. 4 months later, after rejecting PS, she will be crying over the state of her heart, left broken by Richard, a handsome white guy, who finally decided to go back to his wife than continue the secret affair with Naina. Naina would see the passing away of her father, with the last words on his lips, those of regret, that he couldn’t see Naina getting happily married to someone. Inspite of her large social circle of friends and family, Naina on many days would find herself eating alone on the dinner table at her house. She, till her last day, would also place a dinner plate next to hers for her dead father and serve food in it. She made a last attempt to find a man, out of desperation, which arose from the fact that all her much younger cousins had been married, many very happy in their married life with kids. She went online for finding a man and this time relaxed many of her women’s lib fanatic rules. She met just a few guys this time, unlike in the past, when she would be asked out left, right and center by guys bowled over by her beauty. Almost all of the few guys she met via the online dating service, simply wanted one night stands with her. A few even refused to pay for the coffee, with the last guy, leaving her with a verbal slap saying “She was past her expiry date and she should look for old guys”. Naina that night had checked herself in the mirror and realized what the guy had meant. That day she extinguished all her desires of finding a man for herself. Naina would keep working as an attorney for the rest of her life, visiting her family members each weekend and playing with their kids. She would visit her father’s home town in India once every three years and buy gifts for all the family members in India she knew and for those she didn’t know. At 58 years of age, while having the usual lonely dinner, Naina would breathe her last on the dining table while rewinding and playing the picture of her entire life. The last picture in her mind would be that of her father playfully throwing a five year old Naina up in the air, with his arms open, waiting for her to fall back into his arms…… Naina’s dead body will be found 6 days later on the dining table with her head slumped forward resting in her dinner plate. No one, neither the cops, nor her friends or cousins, will ever be able to explain why there was a second untouched dinner plate with food in it, next to her.
End.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 at 10:51 am and is filed under Desi Soul Series, Fiction, Superhit Posts.
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