Befriending a beetle, among other things…
My first driving instructor was Ramesh, a slightly short and tubby man, always wore stiff, white shirts like the politicians he was enthralled with. When I met him in Hyderabad, he showed me his office, a narrow hall with a wooden table in the back where he sat on a metal chair, its slant arrested with pillows. The walls were glued with road signs of all descriptions, a tube light flickering as he ran me through the details — it was 1100 rupees for driving and 3500 rupees for license. He recommended the latter. He tore a yellow slip of paper to seal our deal; hands were extended, shaken, and withdrawn. A date was set, timing circled twice over on the slip…
The car was a white Maruti 800. Ramesh made me take my sandals off, he said it helped to learn faster. We drove around for an hour within the small lanes near my home, slowing for school buses, auto rickshaws, stray dogs, and sometimes for Ramesh’s personal chores like for paying his electricity bill in E-Seva office. On the way we had picked up two others like me learning to drive, one of whom was on his mobile phone the whole time chatting with his mate about the latest movie he had seen. During the course of one hour the drivers were switched over three times in total which towards the end put me next to the movie fanatic in the back seat. This man, as he spoke, he paused to hear, the phone pressed to his ear, elbow jutting out dangerously close to my forehead — this was usually followed with a volley of laughter that left his mouth like a cloudburst all at once, sending his body writhing, as he rocked back and forth in that small space he shared with three fully grown, adult humans.
As days went by, I got better at driving and Ramesh always said only the most encouraging things — you are learning fast, better than others, and so forth… He always said the car was a heavy, bulky, inanimate object — it should be treated as such, a substantial body of metal, rubber, and plastic hurtling in two-dimensional space like a feral-being capable of misguiding the one with reins that it was as light as a feather what with the all the demonstrations it was capable of… To Ramesh, a car was above all, a thing possessed…
My first car was a Maruti Alto. I was twenty-seven years old at the time, not yet married, young, looking for a partner. My mother thought it was about time the family owned a car — what would the girl’s side family think of us? Her face resolute when she brought this up. Talking to her was like an exercise in rhetorical questioning — she was never interested in answers, only in the inquiry. My father on the other hand avoided anything that at the outset looked irresolvable. He shared the custody of his mother along with two of his brothers, the poor octogenarian as if on a merry-go-round, being transferred from house to house in tune with the changing seasons. When she came to Hyderabad every year on her scheduled visit, her homecoming always announced the rain, as if she packed all those clouds in her dusty old rag only to whip them up at our home. She stayed with us from June to September. When she left, we shivered in cold — she took all the warmth away. I did not miss her very much — I was young and preoccupied with whatever it was I thought was important at the time. My father had once proposed to his brothers that he could keep his mother all the time, but the other brothers protested — everyone would think we were abandoning our mother, they said… The least path of resistance was to continue with the arrangement until one season the clouds returned too early, and she did not…
Sometimes when I challenged my mother on thorny subjects she would say — where does it go, that demeanour of yours? It is in the blood; you are just like your grandmother… It had the opposite effect on me, instead of belittled, I felt emboldened with this comparison. My grandmother was a craggy person, life hardening her like clay pots inside the furnace. She had thick shell which you could not pierce through, but somewhere there was some tenderness in her which she did not like being exposed — it made her feel vulnerable, so she kept everyone at a distance, never getting too close. And, despite her reservations, if someone got too close, she would lash at them, her tongue a trumpet for stream of offences, one after the other… I never so much as received an embrace from her — she was practical, never emotional. She would tell me I must never trust anyone in life, that I had to start from the default position of mistrust… And so, when my mother compared me with my grandmother, I felt I was stronger, that I had been bequeathed some essence of her. I imagined her blood in my veins, that red, hot blood of this fierce woman who fought like an ox.
She liked telling me about her life — the life she once had with her husband who had passed away one morning in his bed, soundless, as still as a hen sitting on her eggs. They had seven children in total, three sons and four daughters, all of whom worked in the farm with them until such age that they needed to be married. The house that they brought up their children in was erected on stone walls, the exterior plastered with mud and clay. Many of the wooden beams supporting the roof had become exposed over time, sparrows nesting in the hollowed pockets above. I remember climbing into the attic landing, my knees drawn closer to my chest as I laboured, scrawling my name on a beam, in vain ardour, wishing for permanence…
She told me how they dug the well deeper every year, shovelling the mud and carrying it out in pots, pails, and metal baskets. The men who came to work for them demanded more than the daily wage — a sumptuous meal in the noon. This is where she made herself useful to her husband, cooking food for everyone, and serving them portions in proportion to their bellies. They had harvested rice and wheat, the yield sometimes better and sometimes worse. As the children grew older they shared the physical burden at the farm — making temporary dams in the mud to divert the flowing water into each of those rectangular sections of land; diving into the well to clear the algae and other grasses that tended to clog the pipe, sending the motor into a lengthy episode of shudder; sprinkling gammaxene, a popular insecticide, along the ridges that bound the farm; bringing the cart in the morning, bag the produce, carry it home, and subsequently to the mandi, and when this is all over, feed the oxen in the evening…
When the family home was divided among the brothers, I must have been about seven years old, perhaps a little older. Elders were summoned — I remember groups of men sitting across each other on wooden cots threaded with metal and jute wile the women sat on a rug. But to get started they needed the woman who owned the house, and she had not been seen since that morning. It was only late in the afternoon when everyone was retreating indoors that she came home, a heap of sticks on her head. She set the heap down, untying the twine, took the axe and bickered like a savage… The elders were unamused and felt disrespected — she brought those sticks to get it started. Her pyre…
Sometimes, we got to spend our summer holidays at her home, the one she had built with her husband. This was before she grew much older. She was not very likeable, quarrelled with the neighbours for no fault of theirs. Many mornings I woke to the sound of curses, the women maligning each other like toothless witches, spitting on the land between them, drawing lines with chips of charcoal. The potter who stayed near our house did not care — he was spinning the wheel as usual, slapping a handful of mud in the centre, his legs angled out, fingers delicately hollowing the mass before him as he gave shape to his pots.
As she grew older, nearing the imminent demise, she shrank in size, her spine curving like a bow, the stick in her hand serving for the lopsided arrow, as if she corresponded with the elements of the nature, willing the earth to point and shoot… In the end when she had to be lifted like a child, and carried from room to room, did she call to mind that part of her life, the part that was moored in daily squabbles with neighbours?
I never asked her about her life before she was married, all those years ago. What was her childhood like?
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My second driving instructor was Javed, a tall man with calm, placid manner. I had found him on Google, called him and he asked right away if I was looking to convert Indian license to Australian. I said yes, and he said it would be $300 for 5 classes. We set up a date and met near the VicRoads office on a Saturday morning. His car was a white Holden Sedan — it looked old but did the job, grunting occasionally and revving audibly. Javed carried a diary with him at all times in which he noted the schedules, with probably some notes against each learner. I wondered what he wrote against my name — introvert? He reserved some pages of the diary for road rules which he felt were important to clear the driving test. He was always sure to tell me the difference between what was acceptable in India but not here in Australia, like sounding horn for instance — it raised eyebrows here, blood rushing to the cheeks as men and women around you pivoted in their car seats, like vampires sensing a spit of blood. He said he had given up his IT career and moved into the business of real estate and the driving institute. He would make me pull over to a side and draw few lines on the pages of his diary to illustrate the road rules — he spoke slowly, his manner mostly patient. Like a good teacher interested in the wellbeing of his student beyond the driving lessons, he had asked me about my family. I had a one-year-old child at the time, so I told him how difficult it was, and alluded to lack of support from my parents. He nodded sagely, his mouth as if on its own volition, saying words to the effect of take a left here, switch to the middle lane, at the roundabout go straight…
I always met Javed on Saturday mornings except for the last time which was on a Tuesday. This was the day of my driving test which had not gone as planned — I failed the test. We sat in the parking lot after the test and Javed went over the error I had committed — I did not give way to the tram, he was telling me, as he drew on his diary, nib of his pen digging into the paper as he made his point. we were close, he said, when we were outside, one hand holding the diary while with the other he struck something repeatedly.
On the way home I was full of doubts as I ran over the error over and over again, my mind consumed with every little detail, the emotions of that scene choking me. When I told my wife what had happened, she said it was alright, we could apply for it again — it was quite normal for Indian drivers to go for these tests two to three times before clearing. But I was not convinced, I wore a brooding face and hid behind it, cradling my castrated ego…
On that same day I had attended a job interview which did not go very well. It was for a similar role that I was currently in, with similar job description even. When I left the office room my wife was waiting in the foyer — she had taken the day off to spend time with me. We sat there and I told her everything from the minute I walked in to when the woman began drumming her fingers at one point, not as interested, seeming too eager to finish this. They were looking for someone with more experience… At first, I felt cheated, then I felt inadequate. My wife did her best to cheer me up, but I noticed a hint of resignation, like we were not crossing that line she pictured in her head… That night in my dreams I was inside a space shuttle, on its last leg of the voyage, returning to planet earth. The crew is in hibernation pods, and I am repairing the mangled bits of machinery the best I could. I am sweating, my hands are slippery, and I drop the metallic object, its sound reverberating through the shell of the ship. Rubbing their eyes, the crew members wake up as they unsteadily approach me, the lights flickering everywhere. As I try to explain the mangled bits have disappeared and I am just wringing my empty hands. It is too late, they are saying, as they count the hibernation pods. There is one less than the number of crew members — I am offering myself up to be jettisoned.
In the morning my son was not well so we made an appointment with the nearest GP. The doctor checked the temperature, shined a torch, listened through the stethoscope, and smiled, assuring us it was nothing more than cold and cough, nothing a bit of Panadol won’t cure. On the way to office, I had some time for myself — it was quite late, and the train was less crowded at the time. I took the window seat and looked out, the trip from suburbs to CBD usually taking about an hour. Factories with tall chimneys rushed past, the train picking up speed, its syncopating, rhythmic sound taking me back to my doctor visit as a child.
I must have been about seven years old at the time, probably in my third class at school. It was Diwali holidays and my parents had taken us to the village where our section of the inherited house lay waiting. I must have been tired because I slept as soon as I got home, only remember getting up in the morning and being told we had to finish eating our food and make the journey to the farm. We picked our way past the pottery kilns, dark plumes of smoke issuing out of the holes in the roofs, men sticking wedges of wood from under. The path was lined with squat houses to one side and the kilns and their detritus to the other side. As we walked towards the embankment the houses gradually shrank in size, cement roofs giving way to straw and thatch, walls from brick to wood. Closer to the river the houses were decrepit with sagging roofs, their mud-caked floors riddled with pits. Children sat outside in the cover of trees; the roofs of their own houses presently pillaged with shafts of slating sun. Adults were busy rotating the wheels and putting mud on them while some children did the mixing, blunt spades savagely dissecting thawed cakes of mud. There were piles of broken pots littered all along the path intersected with children defecating, and in the background the kilns kept burning…
The walk along the muddy embankment was wildly enjoyable — on the river side the slope was riddled with rocks, their sharp edges jutting out, and on the other side it was covered in clumps of all kinds of thorny bushes, some of them with their branches reaching all the way to the top. The path on the top was only wide enough to accommodate three to four adults walking next to each other, and the difficulty compounded when someone came cycling from the other side, or brought a cow or worse, a herd of unpredictable goats…
Reaching the farm, I found we were already late with a lot of people having gathered under tamarind trees. My father joined one of the groups of men and I was very briefly left alone by myself. One of the men asked me to fetch the newspaper which was lying on an elevated ledge. I took the newspaper and strode defiantly having found a purpose in this adult congregation. But in my self-confident stride I failed to notice the thorns, stepping on one of them with the full weight of my body. I remember pain shooting up like an electric wire. I must have howled like a struck dog for the next thing I remember is my father’s hands lifting me up while someone from the group pulled the thorn out and wrapped the foot in an old kerchief. My father must have carried me home — I don’t remember much of what happened later, only that I was at home and my father said we must go to the doctor to get an injection. I refused, the notion of that sharp needle probing me was nothing to look forward to…But he said it must be done and promised to buy me apple juice or something. At the doctor’s clinic I screwed my eyes shut as the needle plunged into my buttock, weeping horribly afterwards, my face a medley of snot and tears… My father looked about him and pressed the empty glass vials into my palm — they fit snuggly, two of them, small vials of antibiotics. Those vials had rubber stoppers on them which I remember playing with for days after that incident, flipping them on their side…
On the day of the festival a bullock cart was lowered outside the house, the oxen taken away for feeding. The cart was full of marigolds, tumbling down in hues of orange and yellow. The women came in droves, paying for the flowers while their children stole what they could, those little hands easily fitting through spokes of the wooden wheels. I helped my mother carry the flowers inside where she busied herself with tying them into garlands — a long needle with a white thread in its wake pierced through the flowers’ stems, followed by a simple knot of two to three flowers at regular intervals. While this was happening, I found a shiny object on one of the flowers, the size of a fifty paisa coin. It turned out to be a small insect. I alerted my father who was outside reading his newspaper. He said it was a harmless insect, a beetle, and I could keep it if I wanted. He demonstrated, holding the beetle on his index finger as it moved ever so slowly, shifting between his fingers, its segmented body adjusting to the difference in elevations of his fingers as it moved about. He inverted his hand, and the beetle was still there, its tiny legs holding on in defiance of gravity.
In my palm the beetle cowered, its legs pulled tight, it lay on its back, unwilling to participate. I left the beetle in a shelf near the radio and came back after some time — it was still lying on its back like a dog submitting defeat. A little while later it opened its legs but could not flip over, struggling as it thrashed, its tiny legs pointed all over the place, very uncoordinated, like independent antennae searching for the hiss of cosmic background… At this point I helped the beetle to its legs, and it began walking, its movements so slow that it was like watching a film with each of its frame frozen in time. In the days that followed I put the beetle in an emptied matchbox much to my mother’s chagrin — she had found all the matchsticks strewn in one of the shelves. I made small holes to the matchbox so the beetle could breathe while it rested in it at night. I learnt from my father that it was an herbivore, so I fed it breakfast — an assortment of leaves I found outside the home. It reluctantly climbed over and sat in these leaves, never showing any interest in eating. It acted like it was homesick, so I took few petals of marigolds and made a nice, soft bed for him inside the matchbox. I don’t remember when it struck me, but I took a length of thread and wound it around the beetle’s exoskeleton just over the segmented part of the wings. And now it could move freely for as long as the length of the thread allowed it. At home, I took it everywhere with me, and if I was going outside, tucked it in the matchbox, slipping it in my pocket.
The end of our ambiguous friendship came when my mother was slapping water on the ground with a plastic mug. My beetle was on the ground at the time, tied to the thread, and he must have got the scare of his lifetime, for his heart froze and he did not move any of his six legs or two mandibles after that. I rubbed his shiny back with the tip of my index finger, blubbing like a baby, before letting it go. I tormented my mother for days after that for killing my beetle.
By the time I went to office it was almost lunch time. I checked my emails, made a few calls, and waited for the lunch break during which I hastily ate my food and took a walk in the botanic garden. I sat near a row of trees overlooking a serene pond while the sun filtered through the clouds above. In the distance, a man and woman were lying down with their backs touching. The woman rose, her elbows planted squarely, holding her face in the cup of her hands. Her long hair fell like rivulets on his face as she leaned closer. His head rose to meet hers, but she withdrew, smiled, teased him for a fleeting moment before her head lowered. They seemed young, unspoiled by everything to come… From where I was seated, they seemed devoid of internal lives — they were to me two dimensional cut-outs of cardboard. I, on the other hand, felt like an astronaut on a distant moon, all the messages to his loved ones on earth garbled and inconsistent…
Not all the moons are cold and distant though. Take this one — Jupiter’s moon IO is the most geologically active object in the Solar System, its volcanoes spewing lava the plumes of which shoot up to as high as 500 kilometres. Some of this stuff eventually ends up orbiting Jupiter as it exits IO’s thin atmosphere. Jupiter, with its strong magnetic field, eventually rallies up gases and dust from IO, and wears them around it, a cosmic electric blanket that can shred elements, irradiating and ionising them in the process. In the service of Jupiter IO suffers tidal heating and internal friction as it is pulled apart between the other moons and the planet itself. The pockmarked surface of this moon when seen from earth looks more like a chocolate chip cookie, belying the incredible nastiness lurking underneath… We are all like IO, chocolate faced, with subterranean internal lives…
In the days that followed the pandemic rose like a miasma, hovering over our lives, as we dithered aimlessly…Crowds left Melbourne’s CBD, birds returned to roost in Southern Cross and Finders Street stations. In stages, the city lost its colour, like a tissue turning pale as its cells were deprived of blood and oxygen. News channels covered the desolate streets, the graffiti of street art with its cans of spray now looking more like the beginning of an inverted apocalypse where the zombies were replaced with essential workers, masks like orphaned wings of butterflies, seeking their pairs in this new world…
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My third driving instructor was a Greek man in his fifties. Cornelius was a big man for the small hatch he drove. When he spoke about his life, I always got the feeling that he was a rich man, with a few other cars at home which he drove around town. He also spoke about the houses he owned in Melbourne, one of which was under renovation, and he was giving that away to his elder son. The car he brought for driving was a Peugeot hatch, small but nimble, it drove like it was high on drugs, in love with itself…
Cornelius told me I drove well and should clear the driving test for the sake of my family, for my child. We spoke about our families while on the drive, his voice like a baritone, his vowels rounded than usual, his consonants as if he was squashing them — they fell out of his mouth too quickly. It was inconceivable to him that I did not own a car, relying on public transport instead. He said he had not sat in a bus, train or tram in many years. Even when his car broke down, he always preferred taking a cab to go home but never public transport. He seemed very distressed with the fact that his mother, an octogenarian, had been going against his wishes, waiting for the bus in bus stops, and at times forgetting her myki card. This had occasioned a brief altercation with one of the bus drivers recently for she could not read the bus numbers very well, what with her declining sight, and got into the wrong bus, ending up in an unfamiliar suburb…
I pictured this in my head, an old woman swinging her stick, taking unsteady steps, eyes misty, cold wind snapping the air out of her lungs. In the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, an old woman reaches her home, sets the basket down and leans on her chair, stoking the embers in the fireplace over which big photographs of the count and countess hang, their expression that of shock at the painter. The old woman is hungry, but she has only got the one loaf of bread left which she breaks in half, puts one half in the plate and bags the other half securing its noose for a later time.
But as she sits down to eat her bread with some soup from last night, she hears a shrill cry from outside her door, a shadowy figure now dallying near the entrance. She gets up from her chair, picks up the stick and approaches the door — she can hear scrabbling noise and some heavy breathing but the knock on the door is gentle as it would be if it was her granddaughter. The old woman calls her granddaughter’s name but in response can only hear a sort of mewling sound as if the girl was hurt. She opens the door, and the wolf rises, its body framing the door, its wet paws on her shoulders, claws digging into the soft tissue, knocking her down, teeth tearing up the vertebrae in one fell swoop.
What the poor old woman did not know was that the wolf had met her granddaughter in the forest. The girl had been wearing her red hood, a basket full of fruits and bread tucked in the bag under her arm as she paced down the forest, on a path that had tracks of a cart recently pulled. She had been warned of the dangers — her mother before setting her off had told her to keep her head bent and simply follow the path, to never stray from it. She must not trust anyone she met in the forest, myths have it that cursed animals patrolled the perimeter of the forest — but she must not burden herself with them because the path was a special one, it had once been trod on by angels with beautiful, long hair and voices that were at once rapturous, turning those cursed creatures into putrid balls of fire if they set their foot on that path.
The girl kept her head down as her mother instructed, clutched the bag tight to her chest and only looked to the front. But the forest was wondrous, its tall swaying trees in the entrance gave way to short trees with hanging roots that did not bother to stir even a single leaf. In the middle of the forest, it was so dense the air felt trapped, the path turned slippery, and sunlight as if banished by the cornucopia of leaves above. In this quiet she heard the first sound of wet paws and muffled breathing. Her heart raced and she picked up her dress folds, made a clutch of them as she quickened her stride, teetering in the mud. The sound of twigs breaking just behind her shoulders gave her a shudder that rippled through her body. Her heart skipped a few beats, and she stopped, breathing heavily.
When she first saw him, he was bleeding, his paw had lost a claw and the wound about to fester. The girl put her basket down and tore a slip of cloth from her dress to tie up the wound. The wolf howled in pain, its neck cast to the heavens, as the little girl pat him on the neck, its voluminous mane so soft she pressed her cheek to it. What was a little girl such as herself doing in the forest? The wolf wondered. To this, the girl told him she was carrying a basket full of bread and fruits for her grandmother who lived on the edge of the town on the other side. But how does the little girl know which house it was? Easy, it was the house with crooked gargoyles on the door’s hinges. The wolf advised the girl to pick some flowers on her way — they were right here by the stream behind that row of trees…
The girl found those flowers and the wolf bid farewell. She had strayed from her path and spent a long-time walking in circles, the forest looking much the same everywhere she went… It was late in the evening by the time she reached her grandmother’s house. She knocked on the door but only heard a mewl. Opening the door, she noticed the stained carpet and the scuff marks such as the ones made by a creature with sharp claws. She put the basket on the table where the plate with half a loaf of bread lay. She removed her red hooded jacket and folded it before sitting by her grandmother’s side. Reaching for the blanket she found her grandmother was much bigger in proportions than she imagined, her legs and hands tucked under. What was the distress? The girl wondered as she rested her hand on what she thought was her grandmother’s hair, stroking it. The mane was soft as if her fingers were strumming the air itself. The wolf rose, its eyes livid with energy, and the roar deafening. She was reminded of what her mother had said — not to stray…
I cleared my driving test and bought a car, Nissan X-Trail. We went on long drives with our three-year-old son strapped in his child seat. The countryside here was pure and untouched, landscape altering every few kilometres, sometimes absurdly flat and other times ebbing and dipping as if the land was mimicking the sea in its own way… We drove through forests so lush they looked like wet mops that needed wringing, drove through beach towns that radiated as if from spray of the sea, drove over mountains so foggy it was like a fishing net choked with clouds had descended on us. We felt liberated, our lives back on four wheels. I fell in love with the car — it invaded my dreams, my hands on the wheel as the machine whirrs into life, the warm interiors on a cold morning beckoning me like a forest nymph from a fairy tale. It takes me to Hyderabad where I park in my apartment in Hyderabad. There is no one — the watchman who lives in the small room behind the lift is missing. It is late at night and the lights have come on, but it is silent like a nuclear mishap sent people packing. I take the stairs, two at a time like I used to — It is all coming back to me now, the polished granite skirting outside the houses, with flowers in potted plants, and shoe racks with sandals and shoes. I pause at the foot of the stairs on the third floor, scaffolds of cement above. I seem to have forgotten how to climb, my feet turning to noodles, my body splashed on the floor like a blob of paint, hands dithering.
Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ was published in 1899. In it he proposes that dreams are manifestations of a dreamer’s wishes — unconscious wishes which he may not be aware of as yet. But he realises that there are some dreams that can’t be explained this way. So, he threw in some stimuli — internal such as someone with a fever or high temperature may dream that his house is on fire; external such as when you hear the alarm it infects your dream turning into something like a school bell for instance… Mostly though, he postulated that dreams were amenable to interpretation provided we have all the factors and variables handy. His psychoanalysis of the mind was based on concepts such as the ‘id’ and ‘ego’ wherein ‘id’ sat at the bottom demanding like a child, all instinctual with zero tolerance; the ‘ego’ on the other hand ensured only the right responses from the ‘id’ filtered out based on societal norms, cultural influences, and so forth… But if the ‘id’ was suppressed and if did not get what it demanded, over a period of time it turned against you — that led to some form of mental catharsis. This is sometimes referred to as the hydraulic model of the mind where force is built over time, and it looks for a release…
I have tried interpreting my dreams, most of which take me back to Hyderabad. Could it be that memories are like wine that needed time to ferment and get a coat of nostalgia without which they are not ladled up? I have found this true with writing — recounting something recent fills me with angst but to throw my head back and close my eyes as I search within for an old memory fills me with joy. And may be dreams and writing are similar that way — they are both responses to some stimuli, sometimes they are even responses to boredom as I have noticed with my dreams just making things up for the lack of anything better to do; they are both problem solvers in so far that some men have claimed to have come upon solutions to intractable problems in their dreams and some while labouring over pieces of paper; they are both hydraulic if we were to give credence to Freud’s theories, exploding on the dome of one’s head or on an opinionated piece of writing; they are both flights of fancies, espousing the unrealistic side of life turning them into fantastical episodes of pure joy; they are both liberating albeit one unconsciously inside the head and other consciously done with a pen and paper; above all, they are both solitary affairs…
