Full Circle

To Jha on his Birthday, Nov 27, 2006.

2
 Introduction

It was the morning after the festival of lights and amidst public service calls for cleaning
the neighborhoods off the firework debris from the night before, the radio and television
announced the end of one of the brightest stars in India.

The dark night of Diwali, which along with being a night of fireworks, gambling,
drinking and other indulgences of the rich, also held special importance for the clan of the
now deceased Damru Gosain – one of the greatest percussionist in the world and the
mystic consort of the one-time first lady of the United States of America, also deceased.
He followed his mother, grandmother and grandfather in his death on the night when,
traditionally, his young clansmen took initiation into the career of thievery.

After grand travails all over the world, he died at his home, like a rodent in its burrow, by
ingestion of rat poison. Leaning over his dead body was the body of the now infamous
Savannah Hesse, the estranged wife of Johnny Hesse, the 46th American President. The
jug of water at the bedside contained lethal amounts of anti-coagulants and a piece of
paper with traces of the popular rodenticide lied under the bed. They were discovered by
the house-help who got suspicious when they didn’t answer his knocks to pick up the
phone, which had some Jamaican friend on the line. At the time of their death, the only
other person in the house was Damru’s senile father.

The investigators declared the deaths as suicide and the newspapers mourned for the
master drummer and pointed fingers at the lady without qualm. Many were not surprised
and claimed that an end like this was expected, given all the drama that the relationship
had been a part of. It stayed in the news for months in his country and was very soon
forgotten in hers; they had already ridiculed her enough and were civil enough to let go of
the dead rather soon.

Theirs was a rather odd relationship. He was a quiet drummer who had achieved
phenomenal fame in his musical career; and she was a beauty queen turned a vivacious
model turned the first lady turned a senator turned the presidential hopeful turned a waste
for what she claimed to be the love of her life. He knew little about the world and
claimed to know much little than he did; she claimed to have understood the world and
everything in it. He wore rags and beads, sported dred, smoked ganja and practiced a
strange blend of Rastafarianism and hindu occult traditions; she wore designer clothes
and diamonds, changed hairstyle frequently, drank like a fish and even though not
particularly fond of the church, maintained to be a catholic. He came from an unknown
family and was revered amongst the destitute and downtrodden; she came from a
respected family and had associations with the rich and trendy. He didn’t have a high
school diploma; she had a masters’ degree in statistics from an Ivy League college. He
was younger by over a decade.

--

3
It was the opening of a state-of-the-art AIDS facility, called the Seva Hospital, in Ghana.
The fifteen hundred acre campus encompassed a huge residential hospital area besides
research labs along with playgrounds and entertainment centers. It was another amongst a
series of such hospitals that the legendary drummer Damru had set on a mission to
establish the world over. Constructed 70 kilometers south of the city of Kumasi, the
capital of the culturally rich Ashanti region in Ghana’s heartland, the buildings were
typical example of the Ashanti architecture with courtyard based houses, and walls that
had striking reliefs brightly painted in mud plaster. Rectangular rooms surrounded the
courtyards and the ceilings had elaborate paintings and inspiring quotations so that the
sick could positively indulge themselves while lying on the bed. The entire construction
was overseen by Damru himself and the only goal was to provide the best sanctuary for
those suffering and especially the ones in the terminal stages of the disease. It could
house over 15000 people including the doctors, nurses and research staff; and was rightly
touted to be the biggest such facility in the world. A bevy of leaders, activists and
opportunists from around the world had gathered on that hot summer day to be a part of
the inauguration ceremony that was put together at a very grand scale by the health and
the cultural ministry.

The dignitaries took turns to the podium and expressed their hope and congratulations
after a presentation by the Congolese Minster, who talked about the scope of the facility
and also the magnitude of the problem, along with passionate appeals for help from all
over. The initial few talked in general terms and poured promises of sustaining the hope,
without any commitments. The vice-president of the former Congolese colonial power
Belgium came around midmorning and announced a long term Belgian aid to the
hospital. This unleashed a chain of donations from rest of the who’s who that came after
her, while some of the ones that had missed the opportunity mumbled and cursed their
mommies for naming them higher up in the alphabetical order. Every dignitary took a
few minutes more than they had been allocated and by the time the managing director of
the Catholic group that was supposed to administer the hospital, also the independent
presidential nominee in the impending elections for the president of the United States,
came onstage, everybody was hungry and really bored. She was smart enough to not
waste time on rhetoric and softly promised a ten fold increase in AIDS allocations by the
United States government, if she were elected; and half of her personal fortune to the
similar facility in Burundi that was proposed by the British foreign minister, in the
meanwhile. This was picked well by her campaigners in the states and the very next day
they started an ad campaign where voters were repeatedly reminded how important their
votes were for the AIDS patients throughout the world.

He came from the audience when everybody on the stage was starving. He had his
characteristic rag-robe on, a Dejembe drum hanging around his neck and a little baby in
his arms. He approached the mic, looked into the AIDS afflicted baby’s eyes and
teardrops rolled down his brown sturdy cheek. He stood wordless for a minute, staring
into the baby’s eyes. Cheers from the crowd brought him out of trance. He handed the
baby to an aide nearby and started banging on the djembe. The crowd went delirious at
the sound of the drummer’s beat and soon became a part of the rhythm. Those who could
find a surface or drum to bang on banged on them, others clapped or made sound from

4
their mouth; and everybody swayed including the little baby in the aide’s arms. In his
heavily accented voice he asked the dignitaries to join him by thumping on the table,
which they couldn’t refuse. One eccentric prince from a gulf country took it a step further
and started dancing, matching the beats by banging his designer loafers. Amidst the
musical frenzy, Damru dedicated the hospital to the undying human spirit in face of the
deadliest curse on the mankind and the crowd cheered while many of the hungry
dignitaries wished that the frenzy ended soon.

The ceremony continued till late in the evening as different local and international
musical stars took to the stage and regaled the crowd with songs and sounds of hope and
struggle. Later everybody enjoyed a hearty feast of local dishes cooked by the AIDS
patients. The VIPs didn’t have a choice but to jump in the line with the rest and feel the
dust in their much-awaited meals.

While the rest were busy feeling the moment and fixing irrelevant deals, the lady in
Savannah Hesse was smitten. It wasn’t hidden from the press how she made her way
towards the dreadlocked rasta playing with a group of children in a corner while all were
enjoying the feast. She waited for his attention without a care for the cameras that were
recording her every movement with utmost continuity. After a good half an hour or so,
Damru looked at her and giggled like a child, which instantly melted her core. She smiled
back and struggled for words on her awestruck tongue as he folded his hands in greeting.
The gorgeous beauty queen of yesteryears who had never felt a tinge of nervousness
approaching people had to muster all of her strength and courage to ask him out for
dinner. She didn’t have a choice. Even though her campaign was in swing, she had been
camping in Ghana to facilitate the beginning of operations in the hospital. She had just
one more night left and she had to act on what she had been feeling the whole of last
week. She had known of him for quite a while and was fairly impressed by his story and
deeds, but she had no idea of the simple musician’s charm till she spent the week
working with him. It was hard for her to believe the way she felt; but that’s how she had
felt. She folded her hands back in Namaste and whispered her desire for a private dinner
with him.

Forever a gentleman, Damru felt genuinely ashamed to decline her invitation citing other
engagements but promised to oblige her a month later when he was supposed to be in the
states for a music festival. The cameras caught how he folded his hands over hers as he
whispered his response.

--

‘He cannot be from this earth. There’s nothing real about him. He can converse with the
masses with his eyes and his emotions are the purest I have ever seen. He is a child in the
fine body of an adult. He cares without a care for anything or anybody around him. He is
the most beautiful saint ever. He is a complete man. He made me feel like a young girl
again.’

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Thus she wrote in her diary that night. She had lost her dreams for years but that night it
came back to her; she dreamt of the bouncing dread on his rock-solid chest. She blushed
in her sleep and woke up with a glee, which wasn’t hidden from her aides either. She had
the same dream every night for the whole month and she woke up with the same glee
every morning.
Her Basics

It had been a long journey for the skinny girl from upstate New York to the white house
and back on the road to the presidential palace. She was undoubtedly the most beautiful
politician the world had ever known but there was so much more to the beauty than just
the killer looks.

She was named after the city in Georgia her father, a distinguished college professor,
came from; and was born and grew up in the all American city of Troy, the home of
Uncle Sam. Next to the state’s capital, Albany, it was a small town of less than seventy
thousand people spread on a moderately hilly terrain over an area of ABC sq miles. The
town was settled on the bank of River Hudson by rich Dutchmen towards the end of 18th
century and was named after the legendary city of Troy from Homer’s Iliad. An
important seat of engineering excellence, it used to be the fourth richest city in the
country in the first half of the 19th century, when it had almost twice as many residents as
today, and one of the important industrial centers till as late as the early twentieth
century, at the dawn of which more than 90% of America wore collars made in Troy. It
was one of those places where the residents took pride in the past rather than the present.
A past that had seen immense technological breakthroughs - from the advancements in
foundry and forging to the first Ferris wheel and the very first technological institute,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in the English speaking world, which was perhaps the
only living reminder of the glory of the years bygone. It also had its cultural milestones
that included the grand Victorian buildings, which were still in abundance in the
downtown now turned ugly by the interspersed modern construction, and a beautiful
concert hall that still boasted of one of the best acoustics in the country. Quite
interestingly, the sobriquet, the home of Uncle Sam had nothing to do with any of those.
Uncle Sam, Samuel Wilson, was a prosperous meat packer here during the civil war at
the beginning of the 19th century. He had obtained a contract to supply beef to the Army
in its campaign farther north, and he shipped the meat salted, in barrels. The barrels,
being Government property, were branded "U.S." and the teamsters and soldiers joked
that the barrels were the initials of Uncle Sam himself. Later, anything marked with the
same initials (as much of the Army property was) also became linked with Sam Wilson
via his coincidental initials. After the war the soldiers carried the joke with them to their
homes and over a period of time the name became synonymous with everything
american. She took immense pride in the fact and never forgot to mention this connection
in her speeches everywhere – from the Miss America beauty pageant to the presidential
elections.

Her father taught mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her mother taught
the same at a local high school; its no wonder that she ended up following the suit with
her bachelor’s in mathematics and masters’ in statistics.

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It was a rather uneventful childhood for the skinny girl in the small town. They lived in a
big old Victorian house, which still had a number of original tiffany stained glass
windows in original architectural setting. Her father’s pride, the house was acquired from
a dying old lady for peanuts, on the condition that it would be preserved in its original
condition and he took extra pain to maintain it as such. Her mother had a strong affinity
for plants and they had different kinds of willow, cherry, sycamore, cypress, maple and
dogwood trees around the house that gave it a dreamy feel for the most part of the year,
especially fall and spring. They also had a beautiful butterfly garden in the backyard with
a variety of marigold, redbud, daisy and hawthorn plants along with a beautiful butterfly
house. Being the only child in such a setting, she took to dreaming as indulgence and as
they say old habits die-hard; she stayed a dreamer for the rest of her life. She developed a
deep appreciation for colors from the very beginning by marveling at the colorful leaves
on the trees and the butterflies fluttering in the backyard. Her favorite trees were the
autum blaze maple, the red dogwood and the white as snow yoshino cherry. Amongst
butterflies she was quite fond of the colorful tawny emperor. She thought endlessly of
being a butterfly and her nights were full of visions of her fluttering all over the world as
one or the other. She saw herself dancing with red-spotted purple wings at the torch of
the statue of liberty, as the majestic hackberry emperor playing in the columns of the
white house, as a common buckeye on the empire state building, as a little green comma
in the mist of the Niagara…

Her catholic parents were very catholic and took a lot of pride and pains in adhering to
the catholic principles. They religiously went to the church every Sunday morning and
paid mind to the sermons without any criticism, which was rather odd for the logic-junkie
couple. They believed in a life of utmost discipline and she had to rely on her mind to
realize her sensual potential. Under her mother’s supervision for the most part of the day,
she was a straight A student who wore long tunics for the most part of her high school
and ruined her eyes staring into the computer screen; and she topped that with glasses the
type her father wore. She was the valedictorian whose mother had to ask a nerd’s parents
for a company to her high school prom. She didn’t really care about any guys in the
school; she knew it that she was far above all of them. Going to the Sunday school at the
church, she was initiated into realization of her physical assets in the early teen years.
The priest-teacher couldn’t get his eyes off her and, without realizing, she found herself
checking out other kids to find out what was special about her. In the later years she had
known that she was more beautiful than any other she had seen. She had brief glimpses of
her body and her face in her dreams – in ways that she was not able to see herself in the
mirror where she spent hours hoping to see herself in hairstyles she wanted, the dresses
she wanted, the makeup she wanted. Her only moments of satisfaction those days were
when she looked at her naked self in the mirror; without her glasses, of course. She loved
the way her breasts slanted over her chest and turned inward in a cusp that gave them just
the right amount of perk for her perfectly round nipples to sit on. Her slender waist could
use a bit of volume but she liked the way they curved in from her torso. Her butt, even
though small, had a beautiful curve to it; she’d squeeze the cheeks endlessly to observe
the bubbled conformance. She stood a good 5 feet 8 inches with slender legs. She had a
beautiful face, which she thought was inherited from her father. It was the color of a

7
brimstone butterfly; by some beliefs the specie that gave the word ‘butterfly’. She had
quietly compared the symmetry of her face around the bridge of her nose with every girl
she had come across; and she didn’t find one better, at the best of her objectivity. Her
cheekbones raised exactly the same height on both sides and the fullness of her cheeks
was impeccably adorned with beautiful dimples when she giggled. Her ears were
perfectly symmetric to the line through the tip of her nose and her jet-black hair, even
though not styled, had a luster and strength to them.

Whatever was taught in the school came easily to her and even though she never had to
try too hard, her parents’ discipline kept her serious enough towards the studies. She
could beat her mom in scrabbles sometimes and her dad in chess; and them both in
bridge. As far as sports went, all she could do was swim, which came about due to the
persistent efforts of one of the couple of friends she had. Back in the middle school, that
girl had a crush on he swimming instructor and she thought that she stood a chance by
flaunting her budding chest in tiny swim tops to the middle-aged coach. Savannah could
never guess the reason but acquiesced to her friend’s desire and joined with trunks over
her swimwear. Soon she was a good swimmer and represented her school in tournaments
and all. She never had a desire to try any other physical activity, other than the weekly
vacuum cleaning that her mother made her do since the time she was able to walk with
the cleaner in her hands, which she quite enjoyed every single time. She was an amazing
dancer but mostly in her head. She practiced her moves in her dreams and every once in a
while showed them to the couple of her friends, who as it turns out, discovered their
physical fondness for each other during one of the ballroom dance moves in her bedroom.

She knew that the days of catholic living were not permanent and had started planning
her life after redemption years in advance. She knew that she had to get as far away from
her current life as she possibly could. Her beyond excellent academic record and 99th
percentile SAT score ensured her admission with scholarships from everywhere she had
applied. . As far as the major went, that was unanimous without a debate, and fully
pleased with their only progeny’s lifelong adherence to their values, her parents let her
choose the college she wanted; and little did they know why she chose the University of
Southern California in Los Angeles over Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
University of California, Berkley. Even though the school wasn’t nearly in the same
league with others, old professor had an adversary, who he secretly admired, in the
mathematics department at USC and thus he held some regard for the math program; and
didn’t protest the decision.

They threw a grand party before her departure. A whole bunch of teachers and professors
along with a handful of her invitees savored the hearty feast and elaborate details about
the different plants and butterflies in the household; and she chilled in the corner,
dreaming of days to come. Her parents came with her to the sunny California and camped
at a nearby hotel for one whole month while she adjusted to life at the college. It was a
beautiful campus in the middle of the typical Los Angeles bustle and was quite a change
from the quaint campuses of upstate New York. Her parents took a detailed look at the
campus and compared the modernity of this one with the ancient RPI. Both were private
universities and almost the same size, so most of the comparison was fair enough. First

8
observation was the stark contrast in the colors between the two places. Where they came
from, there was a lot of greenery enveloping the red-sand colored brick and dull brown
wooden architecture that had sloped Victorian roofs as was mandated by the excessive
snow that the place saw every year; here, there were very few trees, which she as well as
her mother found disappointing, and plastered walls in different colors adorned the
concrete buildings which had flat roofs, except the dorms, surprisingly. The dorms here
had small apartments, triangular in shape in which a concrete plane parallel to the base
divided it to make for the two bedrooms – one above and one below. The bathroom,
kitchen and a small living room fitted in the lower third of the structure, along the
hypotenuse. The family unanimously liked this arrangement better than the modified
Civil War era hospitals, whose big halls were partitioned to make multiple small rooms,
at RPI dorms. Different dorms were closely situated here in one corner of the campus and
shared a common dining hall, which was again judged a better scheme compared to the
dorms that were scattered everywhere on the campus and had separate dining facilities,
there. The family believed in sanctity of every food and didn’t bother judging, except that
the meal plans here were cheaper. They judged the modern computer center with fairly
low ceilings inferior than the grand ex-chapel with arches and high ceilings there. The
departments here, her father thought, had more of an academic feel to them because the
offices and labs were more clustered and the corridors were shorter, as compared to there,
where the corridors were long and the offices unnecessarily big. The football team here
interestingly called themselves Trojans, she had pointed out to them, and they had a
hearty laugh at it; her mother had commented that she wasn’t alone from her hometown
here. They were a Division A team and played in a majestic stadium which definitely
couldn’t be compared to the lower division team there, which played in a simple ground
with a few wooden benches for spectators. So, he compared the stadium to the Fieldhouse
at RPI where ‘the engineers’, the Division A Ice Hockey team played; this one was still
judged grander. The union building was much bigger here but housed a much smaller
Gym. They had an elaborate food court with multiple different eateries as compared to a
couple of hole in the wall fast food centers back home. The swimming pool was almost
the same size but outdoors as compared to the one indoors there. The auditorium here
was bigger but nowhere as impressive as civil war era playhouse. It was a smaller library
here but had much higher volume. Her father was pleasantly surprised by the journal
subscriptions here. It also had a much higher number of computers inside and indexing
software was more user friendly, he thought. To escape their public transportation trips
for her to familiarize with the locale, she spent a good deal of time in the library; majority
of it looking for malls and shopping centers on the Internet.

They chose her first semester courses with a good deal of discussion chalked out an
elaborate plan for the rest seven semesters as well. She participated eagerly in the
discussions and happily consented to their choices. She knew that she could handle any
course and first days in the classrooms boosted her confidence further.

It was mandatory for the freshmen to stay on the campus. She roomed in one of the
undergraduate dorms with a gorgeous girl from Atlanta, Georgia, and their parents had
immediately bonded for that reason. The girl, Brianna Smith – a humanities student, had
an air of arrogance about her and she tried to ignore the geek virgin from the home of

9
Ferris wheel and Uncle Sam, initially; later, though, they became very good friends.
Savannah took it in stride and acted oblivious to Brianna’s ignorance. She stayed cheerful
and contained till her parents were in town. She let her mother arrange the place in
colorful floral patterns happily and vehemently defended it in front of the nosey Resident
Assistant who thought that the bright drapes stood out in the building.

The day she saw her parents off at the airport was perhaps the happiest day of her life till
then. Her mother cried and her father sobbed; and her heart was skipping beats since the
night before. They reminded her to be careful with the credit card and cautioned her
against withdrawals from the hefty checking account they had opened for her. At the age
of Seventeen, she was without supervision for the first time in her life; and that too in the
big bad LA. Having seen them off, she took a cab to a mall not too far from the airport;
she had already done her research.

Brianna was shocked out of her breath when she entered their dorm that evening. Her
roommate had been a sleeper. She was greeted by an overflow of bags in the living room
and an overwhelmed Savannah Johnson in mini skirt for the first time in her life.
Savannah explained nonchalantly how generous her parents had been to take her out
shopping before leaving. Brianna felt really jealous and that sort of accorded Savannah a
certain level of respect in her eyes. The respect was well deserved because the
transformation was immaculate. The glasses were shed for soft contact lenses and the hair
was trimmed to shoulder length. The tan laced boots added an inch to her height and the
way they hugged her calf, and the contrast with the soft butter hue of her legs… she had
blushed at herself at the store in the mall. The very first realization of her dreams stoked
her in ways she had never experienced before. Her hands full of bags, the moment she
noticed Brianna’s mouth open and eyes go agape, her confidence was validated. She had
completely replaced her wardrobe and never looked casual again.

She religiously attended the lectures, completed her homework on time and swam
regularly. After initial nonchalance, she was drawn towards Brianna for the need of
transportation; Brianna drove a car and that made everything so much easier. They did
quite well together with few similarities along with a vast amount of disparities in their
ways. Brianna thought that she was narcissistic but she couldn’t care less as long as she
liked what she saw in the mirror. Them both liked parties but she refused to use faked id
to enter places that barred underage entry and never drank a drop of alcohol even in the
house parties. She owned the dance floors whenever she stepped onto one. The diversity
of her moves and adherence to the rhythm made it a delight to watch her in action. Her
roommate was a good follower till she had not over drunk herself, after which there was
no guarantee which way her body tumbled. Guys drooled saliva on their collars at the
sight and though she never refused a single request for dancing, no one got to touch her
till he was able to match her. One particular frat-boy at a sorority party, where they were
invited by a girl she had met at the swimming pool, got the rare distinction of giving her
the first kiss of her life while dancing in a crowded living room. Even though it was the
first time, she was confident of what she was doing. She had a fairly well thought idea of
the situation but the poor young boy couldn’t control himself and poked her behind rather
hard, only to be kicked in his balls in front of his entire brotherhood. She was branded a

10
‘cold-cunt’ or CC in short by the sorry boys and even though people forgot what it stood
for, with time, it stuck with her for a long time. She knew there was no fighting the
nickname when even Brianna took to calling her the same, albeit jokingly; she took it in
stride and later when people had forgotten the genesis she told them that it stood for
‘CoolCat’, which seemed to make sense. However, this turned her off against the
collective culture of Greek families on the campus and boys around her as well.

The first semester ended well. After the exams, they had driven around in Hollywood and
Santa Monica the whole night feeling the glamour and the sensual vibe the closest they
could. They waited few minutes outside different clubs and eyed the beautiful people
lined up for entry; she compared herself with every single girl she looked at. Brianna was
willing to give her sister’s id a try in hands of the mean looking bouncers but CC stuck to
her resolve.

Going from the Sunny Southern California, trip back home for a White Christmas wasn’t
as much fun but she tried to enjoy without complaining. Her best friends broke the news
of their love for each other to her. She was disturbed at the idea and decided that it was
enough when they started making out in her bedroom one odd evening. Her parents were
prouder than ever that their daughter had not taken to the bad ways of the west, which
was not entirely true because other than the trimmed hair and contacts, they had no idea
of the changes in her get up.

They experienced that reality when they paid her a surprise visit, with keys to a Honda
Civic, for her 18th birthday, the next year. If it were some other girl, the old man would
surely have taken a good look at her but this being his own daughter, he couldn’t raise his
eyes above her knee. They turned out to be smarter than she had thought and didn’t make
a big deal of it other than the serious talk she had with her mom in which she was made
to promise virginity till marriage and no clothes shorter than halfway to her knees and
breasts. She promised and promised again in the summer with all sincerity but broke it
less than a year later.

She had to go back home for the summer, which was a particularly dull time of the year
there. With all the university students gone, there was no activity and her parents had a
lot of free time, so, she ended up being wrapped up in their social life and scheme. She
wanted to take a road trip back home but dared not mention the proposition till her third
year.

Brianna studied without scholarship or aid and her parents, supporting two more kids,
afforded her a rather petty pocket money; and working in the cafeteria robbed her
precious time. Hence, she was always on the lookout for ways to make some easy money.
In the series of such quests, during their sophomore year, she came to find out that the
beauty contests paid scholarships. They researched it together and were pleasantly
surprised at the prospects. The Miss Los Angeles / Culver City was inviting contestants
and they fit the eligibility criteria. Savannah compared herself with the past winners and
sent in her application.

11
They prepared for the contest together without going public about it. The deal was that
any scholarships earned would have to be evenly divided. The contest involved five
rounds of competition – talent, interview, fitness in swimsuit, eveningwear and the final
on-stage question round. Brianna had the unique ability to be able to sing backwards and
had every single song by her favorite singer Madonna memorized such. They discussed
together and came up with the list of top ten probable that was likely to be picked if asked
to name one. She polished them and adjusted changes that were mandated due to absence
of music. Savannah translated her dreams and came up with a beautiful butterfly dance
set to the unusual music of Carmina Burana. They speculated and grilled each other with
the possible interview and stage questions. They made many trips to the Beverly Hills
designer stores to pick suitable evening and swim wears; Savannah gladly lent money to
Brianna for the Sachs Fifth Avenue dress that they had liked for her. They objectively
identified portions of their body that needed toning and spent the next month and half
killing them in the gym. Brianna was a part of the debating society and didn’t have stage
freight; Savannah was confident but not fully sure, so, she also joined ‘the Dialectics’, as
the society called itself, to be on the safe side. That move helped her in many more ways
than she had imagined. Her eloquence, reasoning and rebuttal were perfect but the poise
and confidence didn’t come as easy as she had dreamt of; here she had to look into the
eyes. She realized it early and made it a habit to look right into people’s eyes at any level
of conversation. Some found it odd but it sure forced them to be a little more honest,
amongst other advantages.

The contest wasn’t nearly as competitive or grand as these girls had imagined. The small
Morgan-Wixon Theater in Santa Monica was filled to less than half its capacity of about
ten thousand. Five judges – a former supermodel, a current supermodel, a music
producer, a singer and the chief executive of the Miss Los Angeles organization, took
seats in front of the stage. A total of fifty-five contestants began with the display of their
talent and almost two third of them were precipitated below the rest right away. If the
stage on that evening was any indication, the glamour city of angels seriously lacked a
combination of pretty faces and talent. A vast majority had chosen to dance and the
butterfly’s flutter to the crescendos of Carmina Burana didn’t have a match in the pelvis
thrusting hip-hop dancers. The way she glided on the stage in her red-spotted purple
outfit, the judges knew the winner then and there. There were some soulful singers but
none with anything none had known before. Brianna asked the judges to pick her a
Madonna song and she successfully sang ‘preach don’t papa’ to a good applause from the
audience. One pretty girl mimed a skit, which elicited a good deal of laughter but to her
bad luck, she appeared right after Savannah and the initial little bit of her show went
unregistered because people were still recovering from the dreamy drift of the butterfly.

The contestants had already interviewed the five judges one by one the day before. The
dense supermodel was thrown off by Savannah’s comparison of life to a second order
differential equation and had thought her to be the most unsuitable of all the candidates
but had a total change of heart as the evening progressed. She looked stunning in the
strapless dress the color of red dogwood and a faded white necklace, the color of the
fruits of white cypress, that had a thin strand of tiny sparkling crystals. Her swimwear
was inspired by shades of the northern crescent and stood in sharp contrast to the plain

12
bikinis others were sporting. On the stage she was asked about the essence of an
American teenager and she promptly responded,

‘To dream and let dreams be our master because this is the only land where our
destination is limited only by the imagination in our head’.

The applause and glee gave the result of the contest. Savannah Johnson received the best
validation of her life so far in the tiara that adorned her head. Brianna was the third
runner up but she won the unofficial title of the most photogenic face in the competition
and that helped her bag a couple of deals for appearance in local publications. She did
feel jealous but was herself wowed by her roommate; she pretended to be happy and
satisfied. Savannah stood by their deal and paid her a thousand dollars each for the next
five months to payout the promised half of the ten thousand dollars in scholarship that
she received.

After much internal debate she disclosed the win to her mother who didn’t seem to
appreciate it much, though inside she did feel proud. She was questioned in detail about
everything from the items in the contest to the judges and their demeanor with her. The
swimsuit didn’t pass along too well but the fact that there was a talent show and the
prizes were in the form of scholarships did smoothen the whole impact. She was once
again reminded to stay pure till her marriage and was cautioned against the lustful lechers
all over especially in the beauty industry.

The mother mentioned the news to the father who took it in stride. They felt proud
together and let it pass. Little did they know that what they had thought was an ordinary
Contest in the life of their overachieving girl was in fact beginning of a career. It was
good that they didn’t.

Miss Los Angeles, especially in those days of neo-feminist resurrection didn’t hold a
celebrity status. Back in the days it used to, when schools, colleges and social
organizations invited the crown holder to talk and discuss and highlight socially relevant
issues. Now those indulgences were greatly reduced and the title was more about just
being a stepping-stone to the state level competition and working to salvage the
reputation of the pageant, which was increasingly being accused of exploiting naïve
young girls and promoting a false sense of achievement.

Savannah was naïve but definitely not on the stupid side. Her naiveté gave her strength in
taking situations on without a doubt of failure and little did she fail. She excelled in all
activities she undertook. She was a member of the swim team and, coincidently, the
record holder in the college level 200m Butterfly stroke. She had debated senators and
earned much recognition for her common sense approach to resolving issues. In one of
her memorable debates, as a college student, with a state legislator on the issue of energy
generation and reliability, she argued against the motion that the state should lower the
taxes on Petroleum Gasoline in order to provide the much-needed relief in light of sky-
high prices. At its face it looked like an excellent proposition and a very convenient one
for a politician to leverage some votes out of undiscerning public. But at its core, it was

13
nothing more than an unnecessary interference by the state legislature in the scheme of
things in the state. She said that it’s a legislative misadventure that cuts from both sides –
one, it shields the oil companies who, in our system, hold sole responsibility for the price
of their commodity under the constraints of the market; two, it dupes the public into
believing that it’s a gain. Her reason was simple – the rising prices would force more and
more people to explore alternatives or cut down on the mad consumption spree, thereby,
forcing the oil companies into competition with alternative fuels or significantly reduced
demand. She hadn’t resolved an esoteric proposition but her eloquence spelled the
common sense out so simply that its force took the legislator aback. He frustratingly
turned sarcastic and uttered, “ so the government should wait and watch for the
competition to develop while people suffer”. She shot back to the laughter of the
audience, “ you may ban the hummers in the meanwhile”.

She maintained a decent average of grade points all along and kept the core of her
catholic values alive, which to her meant purity and discipline in living and constant
focus on her goals – to the extent that she declined the Miss California contest due to her
fourth semester final exams. With the ultimate conserved and her parents happy, she kept
her life filled with things she liked to do. Her activities took most of her time outside the
lectures, which she seldom missed because to her that meant never have to spend another
hour on the same subject again. It was one of the reasons she loved her stream of studies;
once understood one just had to revise. She didn’t have much of a personal life in the
common sense of the term. She and Brianna had separated at the end of the second year,
shortly after the Miss Los Angeles contest, but remained friends. Brianna had moved to a
neighborhood, 15 minutes away, near museums and She moved amongst the enemies, as
the Trojans called the UCLA students. She liked the university town feel of the
Westwood/Central LA area even though she had to endure the freeway traffic to get to
her college. There were small cafes and a variety of cheap ethnic eateries and it was
much nearer to the beaches. Venice Beach was her favorite and even though never quite
into music, after experiencing it once, she consistently went to the drum circle. She liked
the variety of people and thoroughly enjoyed exploring radically different ideas that
freely flew around in those places. She loved the free vegetarian meals on Sundays at the
Hare Krishna temple. She also liked to drive along the ocean on the pacific coast highway
north of Santa Monica, to Malibu, Pacific Palisades and further up. There were several
pebble beaches along the stretch of a good 15-20 miles and at one place in the Palisades
the ocean had carved a cave in the hill on which the road ran; she loved to make out
there.

She did have a boyfriend for a year in the middle but it ended up being another learning
experience rather than a romantic one, which she craved in her dreams. By the end of
their first anniversary the ultra liberal tree-hugger had enough of the smartass virgin
beauty queen that just wouldn’t put out. He was one of the enemies and liberal studies
major. They met at a small Japanese café that she used to hang out at, with the owner, a
neighbor and friend of hers. The attraction was immediate to a handsome boy
passionately standing on his view of the collective responsibility of the world for issues
like global health and poverty. One of the guys he had been arguing with was her friend’s
friend and thus she got involved in the discussion and argued on his side. By the end of

14
the evening, the discussion as well as each other’s hearts were won and she had a distinct
mushy feeling for the boy. He was wonderful in his calculated casual attitude towards
life; smoked pot, maintained his grades, played tennis, was musically inclined and lived
simple. His details were rather unappealing though, as she found out over the months.
She was disappointed at the depth of understanding and more than that, the complete lack
of any desire to even delve into the deeper levels to get to the core of issues. He was a
wonderful man but too mediocre, she concluded. He had too many heroes and it didn’t
take much to be one in his eyes. He hated corporations and believed that every
government is evil. His ideas couldn’t go beyond the analyses of the apparent – a bad
result was a result of bad intention to him and the fact that they argued a lot, sometimes
rather fervently, meant that their intentions were not right, according to him. He was a
tease and could never satisfy her intellectual desire to discuss at levels beyond facts; to
her, a worthy discussion was not a discussion for agreement on facts rather for
resolutions and conflicts arising out of the existing set of facts. She didn’t feel a tad bit
sad when he announced the formal divergence after their first anniversary dinner. He was
a sweet guy and got her Jasmine for that evening; she loved Jasmine. She made a vow to
beware of ultra liberals. It wasn’t completely bad though, had it not been for him, she’d
have never tried the beauty contest again the next year.

In the third year of her studies she contested the Miss Culver City pageant, which her
current residence permitted and won it comfortably. Brianna, who had now been
modeling actively, helped her this time as well and was genuinely happy at her victory.
She drank alcohol, half a glass of champagne, for the first time in her life, at the
persistence of her boyfriend, who probably saw that as a chance to score the final base.
She hated the taste, it made her feel sick; and definitely didn’t put out.

Following her dreams, that year she went on to win the Miss California contest and
eventually Miss America. Her streak stopped at the second runner up position in the Miss
World competition a few months after graduation from the college.

She had won Miss America in the final semester of college and it was then that she
realized that it was serious. Being Miss America, she had to travel over 20000 miles a
month, i.e. a new city every other day, speaking on issues of public concern; this along
with the grueling preparations for the big Miss world contest. She thoroughly enjoyed
the experience with all its ups and downs. There were too many men coming on to her –
from executives to fashion designers to educators, activists and the general public; and
there were too many issues she had to talk about – from global warming and global
poverty to teenage pregnancy, AIDS and political accountability. It proved to be a
wonderful experience in the sense that it gave her an excellent chance to learn to handle a
diverse range of issues and viewpoints. She had to ensure that she was a fine example of
feminine grace while being forceful and smart in her comments and speeches. This was
not the only upside. The way she looked at it, a year off studies paid for her graduate
school and that’s how she explained it to her parents. She said that since she’d have
money for the graduate school from the scholarship of the win, she wouldn’t have to
compromise on the research of her choice due to the funding concerns. The professor

15
understood it and accepted her beauty contest achievements with a lot of pride. Her mom
never stopped asking her about the status of her virginity. She had kept it intact.

In the Miss world contest, she had to fly out to China and that was a wonderful
experience. She got to meet a number of stunning beauties from around the world. It was
a month long party of 106 beauties, all of them winners in their own right, with an
entourage of over 50 officials with two jets at their disposal. The schedule was hectic and
the discipline was of utmost importance. It was like a constant scrutiny of the entire
personality but she loved it. The diet was regimented, workouts were mandatory and the
beauties were really competitive amongst themselves. For the most of them it was a
chance of their lifetime and how they did in rest of their life depended heavily on how
they performed in the contest; unlike her country, many other places in the world
embraced their beauty queen with much more celebrity. She was buddy-ed up with Miss
Japan and they became really good friends. She was surprised to find out the royal
connections of the sweetest Chibby as they called Miss Japan, Kurara Chibana. She was
also pleasantly surprised at finding out that Miss Ireland was her mother’s favorite singer
Chris De Burg’s daughter. It was a heartening experience in general. She learned how to
say hello in over forty different languages. They got to tour around China for two weeks
and it was thrilling to experience landmarks and traditions that she had, at best, only
heard or read of. She got to be one of the lucky ten that were allowed to stand along with
the world famous terracotta warriors near the city of Xi’an. They were bestowed the rare
honor of the opening of the city gates for them to walk through. The visit to the great wall
was fantastic as well. The first hand experience busted a couple of myths about the wall.
She found out that the great wall is in fact a series of not really too long walls along a
hilly terrain; the guide also mumbled that the Qin dynasty, which started building the
walls, and the subsequent ones for next millennium or so, were not really able to
completely avoid the Mongol attacks, which they were supposed to protect against; It just
made it a little more difficult for the Mongols to come around the walls. It was the
pacifying treatment to the Mongols by the Chi’ing dynasty that proved more successful in
eliminating attacks. She also came to find out that it was a myth that the great wall was
visible from the moon. They were treated with utmost respect and media frenzy
everywhere they went. The busiest road in the world, the Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong
Kong, was closed for half an hour for the contestants to parade through. It was some trip.

She was able to secure a place in the contest finals and about 25 million homes by
winning the fast-track way of the Talent round. She mesmerized the audience again by
her butterfly dance, attired in the light vibrant colors of a harvester, to the music of
Bolero by Chopin. She did all right in other categories but her answer in the final on-
stage question didn’t struck chord with the judges who thought that being able to
experience the ultimate pomp and perks of a beauty queen wasn’t a noble enough reason
as compared to the Venezuelan beauty’s aspirations of using the contest as a platform to
change the world. Hence, she had to content herself with the second runner up position.

She was a little disappointed but it didn’t bother her. In one way, she was happy that she
wouldn’t have to live another year of grueling travel and discipline. Her parents were
really proud of her and the local newspapers gloated news about her. Her life was

16
thoroughly shred apart and everybody who had been anybody had made sure to assert his
or her connection in the home Uncle Sam; she was found purer than she really was.
Living in LA, she had the luxury of choosing to stay an ordinary life. Her achievements
in the beauty contests were never a destination for her; she was just trying to live her
dreams. To her, the academic experiences of the whole process were more of a reward
than the constant propositions and coming –ons. She also liked the monetary benefits and
resorted to all kind of ways to divert as much as she could from her scholarships to her
other expenses. Her parents were generous and took a lot of silent pride in supporting her
financially. She paid back by everything she said and did. Theirs was the toughest
scrutiny and she was perfect. Nobody could complain. In some parts of the world there
were intense speculations of her sexuality and on her volunteer trip to Africa, with her
mom, she was asked the question by a press reporter out front. She was embarrassed
beyond any measure but managed to stay sweet and say no. This was captured by a bevy
of cameras and found a bit of airspace and a lot of cyberspace. Catholic groups were
fascinated at this symbol of purity and the promoters of virginity wanted her to be their
spokesperson after the unfortunate sexual revelations by their last face, Miss Britney
Spears. She tried to stay unperturbed and fulfilled her remaining obligations with the
Miss America organization with her characteristic poise.

To spend the time before grad school, the next fall, she went on a volunteer trip through a
catholic mission to work in local hospitals with AIDS patients. Her mother had proposed
the trip and after three months of volunteer work her father joined them and they spent
the next two months traveling.

They spent two months attached to a hospital run by the catholic mission in Ghana and
the last in Uganda; and the experiences were diverse. Whereas the time in the rep of
Ghana was satisfying, that in Uganda was more distressing. Ashanti region of Ghana,
where they worked near the ancient city of Kumasi, was full of history and magnificent
architecture. The realization that the most unknown places in the world have so much
culture and past behind them was humbling. To know of human excesses and the
humanity struggling in the most basic sense of the word left a deep mark on her. She
dreamt of the British Gold Coast Governor Hodgson riding on the most despicable power
trip, demanding the golden stool that, to the natives, could seat only a representative of
their gods, their kings. Her ancestors, armed with powers of guns and guile, had been so
ruthless and inconsiderate to traditions of lands millenniums old. The country had a
relatively low prevalence of HIV but the official estimates were still far less than the real
figures which, as the mission estimated, were at least 3-4 times more. Even though one of
the better-governed countries in the region, it was plagued by poverty and illiteracy. With
the infection already afflicting almost a quarter of the population in some of neighboring
countries, she rightly understood that it was only a matter of time before the matter would
go out of hands in this country. She used her media exposure to highlight the need for a
proactive role of the government in ensuring control over the disease. She was able to
participate in a joint effort by activists to persuade parliamentarians to vote for a bill that
delegated the responsibility of statistics generation and AIDS education to the department
of education from the department of health, which, in essence, meant that now the
primary school teachers rather than public health officials were responsible for the

17
education and data gathering. The system was changed such that hospitals were asked to
separate their counts separately through the department of health and the non-
conformance between two numbers reflected poorly on typically the lower estimating
person. Years later she was told by her mother that they discussed that particular bill in
one of documentaries about control of AIDS epidemic in the republic of Ghana on the
discovery channel.

The experience was not as pleasant in Uganda. The country had a series of dictatorial
rules by despots and its economy was in shambles. The current president had been able to
hold power for almost a decade but his iron-fisted rule cared little about people. He was
more interested in gaining acceptance in the world and validating his false pride. The
experience was nerve wrecking initially. She understood the statistics well and had
known the numbers but little had that knowledge prepared her for the enormity of the
curse; to the contrary it made it worse for her. She realized that if she was in one of the
countries being lauded for AIDS control, what would it be like at places where it was
officially out of control. She was overwhelmed at the endless series of babies perish
without any understanding of their lives. She was overwhelmed by the endless human
spirit that reflected in dying mothers buying medicines for their babies from their food
money. But as it was, she was very disheartened by the projections. She found out how
the data was hugely distorted. Every single statistics was tainted and every possible errors
were exploited in reporting the numbers to the outside world. She noticed how there was
an immediate need for a little better understanding amongst the afflicted. She argued on
the local televisions for the need to bring out the cold facts about the disease and spread
the truth amongst masses because that was the only way to fight the scourge effectively.
She contended that wouldn’t a suffering teenaged girl be better handling her disease if
she didn’t have a suffering daughter. In a letter to the World Health Organization, on
behalf of the mission, she wrote how it was wiser to divert funds from building hospitals
and helping victims financially in the cities to immediately assess the number really
affected esp in the rural areas. The village, just about 70 kilometers west of the capital
kampala, didn’t figure on the government watch list of critically afflicted villages and she
estimated an infection rate of over 30%. None of her efforts bore any fruits of
significance but the experience shook her and her mother.

At the end of their stay in Uganda they flew to Kenya where her father joined them and
they went on safaris and enjoyed the more exotic side of he country. The trip was
finished in the beautiful South Africa just recovering from its dark past of the apartheid.

Those were memorable five months in more ways than one. Once back home, she was
flooded by requests for comments on the state of affairs in Africa. She didn’t feel
comfortable discussing the experience; she couldn’t even when she tried; her emotions
overwhelmed her memories. She tried in vain to write a small article for The Troy
Sentinel. She wouldn’t say more than a word or two when asked by the radio hosts. One
shock jock was particularly harsh and suggested that perhaps she was out there partying
with the gypsies, dancing their naked dance and all; she broke down on the air. She let
herself cry and used up all of the poor jock’s airtime in an impromptu monologue
lamenting the gaps in understanding and the separation in human lives. The jock knew

18
when to relinquish control and took her venting out in stride; and humored that she must
have prepared the whole sequence because it was so good; and she was embarrassed
beyond her imagination. One of her father’s colleagues had commented to her father that
she was destined to be somebody great. She was just another girl who felt.

She learned the lesson and decided to maintain a daily journal of her life. She abided by
the resolve, on and off, pretty much her whole life.

After her African experience she chose to go to the graduate school for masters in
quantitative studies of social sciences in the department of statistics at the Columbia
University, New York. This was one of the few statistics oriented programs in social
sciences in the country and she got to live near her aging parents. She was also lured by
the modeling prospects in New York, which she had been consistently offered. She
justified that indulgence by the money it brought, a large fraction of which she donated to
charities working on AIDS control in Africa. She had resolved not to spend more than a
week per month on modeling assignments. She had the scholarships so she didn’t have to
depend on a professor for funding and she was free to pick her choice of research.

Her parents didn’t interfere in her choice at this level and listened to her with attention as
she explained why she had chosen to work on the errors in social statistics and
projections. It was a UN funded project and she couldn’t have found a better match. The
professor happened to know her father and was more than happy to accommodate a
graduate student whose bills he didn’t have to pay. She took courses in social sciences
and core statistics; and was pleasantly surprised at the relatively easier grading at the
graduate level.

She lived in the university apartment housing which was conveniently located in the
same lower Manhattan neighborhood of the old Morningside campus. The campus was
something to marvel at. Sprawled over six city blocks, or about 32 acres, between the
harlem and Upper Westside sections of Manhattan, in the neighborhood of Morningside,
this oldest institute of higher education in the state of New York accommodated approx.
25 thousand students, teachers and other staff at its main campus. Besides, the university
owned over 7000 modern apartments in the Morningside neighborhood, which housed
students and staff. To her surprise, she had found a classmate from California the very
first day she visited the campus to formally register. Shanti was a bubbly, petite Indian
girl with a perpetual smile on her face. They had taken quite a few courses together at the
university in California and she remembered running into her and her parents at the Getty
Center, one summer, when she had gone with her boyfriend of the time to check out an
exhibition of Man Ray’s photography. She was pleasantly surprised at Shanti’s father’s
depth of knowledge on photography. He was a teacher and lived in the Himalayas, she
remembered. She also remembered noticing the mischief in the old guy’s eyes at the
photographs of nude Lee Miller.

Shanti had joined the department of mathematics for Masters’ with specialization in
mathematics of finance. Both of them liked the sound of each other’s majors and had a
hearty laugh at it. They wondered why their degrees were MA not MS, ‘why not

19
science?’ and contended themselves with the abstraction of beauty in numbers and
equations. She had already liked the change of humor in her life. They had asked each
other to be roommate almost the same time and taking it as a good sign they applied for a
two-bedroom apartment.

New York city was a world in itself. She had been getting emails, letters and phone calls
from different modeling agencies to launch her but, even though she was mentally
prepared for a stint, she wasn’t impressed by any names. She waited patiently and did her
homework well in studying the details of each and every agency in New York. Brianna
still lived in LA and helped her gather information and impression in the industry. It was
Brianna’s suggestion that she looked up the legendary Parisian Marilyn Gauthier, who
was coming to New York. She had no idea of Marilyn but she liked what she read about
her. One of the reviews said that if there was one agency a mother could trust her
daughter to, without losing sleep, it was Marilyn. She had a small team of dedicated staff
that undertook a handful of models and worked on the top of the line projects only. Her
models were known to be soft, feminine and surreal. She managed her own advertising
agency as well and her ads had won accolades and serious revenue over the years.

As luck would have it, she received an invitation from Mr Morley, the CEO of the Miss
World organization for dinner on a convenient day next week. A colorful man that he
was, he had sent a handmade card with the invitation beautifully calligraphed with hand.
Her mother had freaked out and suspected something fishy in the old guy’s intentions.
She insisted on accompanying Savannah to the dinner and they were in for surprise to be
introduced to Mr Morley’s guest, Marilyn Gauthier. One of the ultimate names in the
world of modeling, Marilyn was on a lookout for deviation from her standards from the
European market. For the American business, she wanted to recruit all American looks—
faces that had just that tinge of edginess on otherwise soft features. Savannah’s looks
fitted just that description to the king of beauty pageants and knowing her reluctant
attitude towards modeling, he had tricked her into an appointment with his friend.
Marilyn was a charmer at the first go. A lady of few words, she expressed herself with
smiles and little gestures. A patient and astute observer, she gently squeezed mom’s
hands just as poor mama had started getting tense at the proposals of modeling for her
girl. She was an old lady and had a very classy demeanor. She softly whispered to mom
that she could be trusted not only in words but in legal deeds. She gently briefed her
policy of signing contracts that clearly stated the don’ts that the models decided; and that
in 90% of he cases it was her models’ mommys. Then, just as mama was softening, she
added that she believed in as little exposure as possible; she had never shown a naked
body in her ads. Mama felt relieved and Savannah heaved a sigh. She also told that in
thirty years of business, she had seen quite a few executives pass through her doors; her
models were known for brains as well. Savannah liked that.

She signed a contract with Marilyn for a period of two years, for peanuts. She was
promised an annual remuneration of 100K and then a meager 5% of every project pro-
rated on the extent of appearance in the entire advertisement. The old lady was very clear
of her intentions that she didn’t promise a lot of money; she promised safety and the
security of graduating from the best. It was more of a school she had stressed. That was

20
her business model and it enabled her to make a lot of money while churning out happy
supermodels. The contract limited the work to not more than 15 assignments a year and
one unpaid project of model’s choice for some social cause or charity. There were
elaborate restrictions on the figure – the models were required to keep the body fat
percentage within +/- 1%, BMI within +/- 1 points and size unchanged for the period of
the contract. Pregnancy was prohibited and so was use of drugs.

Her first assignment was spelled out moments after she signed the papers in Marilyn’s
posh midtown Manhattan office, just a couple of blocks from the Penn Station. She was
asked to take a picture of her face, just out of the bed, every morning throughout her time
with the agency.

The agency started with three fresh faces. Besides Savannah there was a black girl,
Shenique from Missouri and a blonde, Shannon from Ohio. Very gentle faces that were
equally gentle in demeanor. They were both new in the city and rather reserved which
Savannah found rather odd in aspiring models. They started with a week long orientation
that involved long crash courses in facing the camera, makeup, nutrition, workout and
etiquette as well as the modeling industry and finances. Marilyn coached the girls on
camera and the fashion industry herself. She had brought two makeup men who doubled
as nutritionists as well as a constant source of banter in the office – they slept together
and everybody knew of little details that they revealed about each other. She had a
famous Taibo instructor take them through half a day of charged aerobics in return of the
mandatory enrollment for his services. A charming tax and investment attorney briefed
the relevant laws, tricks and mis-tricks of the system that he had compiled over the years
of his experience in the industry.

The girls entered the first day of the orientation in a relatively dark conference room in
the beautifully draped office to the sight of the Three Stooges- Larry, Curly and Moe
playing on the large projection TV in the far corner of the room They look at each other
and giggle while Marilyn, in the other corner, snapped their faces one by one. The lights
were turned on and Marilyn walked behind a camera setup and asked the girls to step in
the light in the center of the elliptical conference room; and repeat the laugh in the
camera. They kept repeating the laughter till it matched the first picture she had snapped
of them. At the end of the grueling first session, they were told of the only trick – forget
the camera; she had repeated it three times, which meant gospel in her domain, the gay
makeup-man had revealed later.

The agency started its first campaign the day her college started. She had no idea and was
taken by surprise when somebody at the school remarked her pictures were all over the
subway. Later in the evening Shanti called her to tell that she was on the screens at the
Times Square. She could resist and rushed in the pajama to witness the first of her career.
She couldn’t believe the magnificence of the simple idea that had transformed girls’
goofy giggling faces, Marilyn had snapped at the day of orientation, into a beautiful
advertisement for the launch of a new mobile phone service called Fun-Mobile that
discounted rates of any calls in which the speaker laughed, which was picked by the

21
special sensors in the special cell phones produced by the leading mobile phone
manufacturers, Harrison Electronics.

The first posters didn’t mention anything about the cell phone; they were pictures of the
girls juxtaposed with somewhat controversial black and white shots of modern
disturbances – rubbles of the world trade center, the president popping champagne aboard
a warship to celebrate the false reports of victory, a dictator’s fallen statue in the oil rich
third world country being ravaged by a war between the invaders and terrorists – in the
back ground. In one corner of the ad it simply said LAUGH. After a week the ads were
replaced by the ads that disclosed the product and the service. It had theirs less than
perfect initial attempts in front of the camera, in the background. A slick phone in front of
the laughing faces took the foreground and on the far right corner it said – ‘ CAMERA
FREE’.

She marveled at Marilyn’s ingenuity and became her fan. They did a number of
campaigns that were fun and experiences in itself. They launched new cars, health food
lines, energy drinks, kitchen appliances and all kind of products. All of them were grand,
out of the box ads that launched new products only, from the topmost corporations. At
the year-end, girls submitted their final daily pictures to Marilyn. In the first week of the
New Year Nike launched a new range of running shoes with the year’s AAF award
winning campaign that featured a 20 second whirl show of three girl-next-door morning
faces followed by the girls running on a trail in the evening. The ad read: Ending the day
with friends on a Trail.

As part of her first year charity project she chose to produce a campaign for her old
association to the world of AIDS – the catholic mission. She had to argue past the boss’
abhorrence for matters religious but it was the only thing she could think of. Her
ambivalence towards the institution of church didn’t matter any more than the cause that
had touched her core.

22
 The Twisted Husband

“It was the same cause that took her to the arms of the devil and quite the same that led
her to her angel who rescued her to death, perhaps emancipation, by the cheapest of
poisons. The charming devil that fell to the same cause”, Caroline Hesse, the darling
daughter of the deceased lady had said while talking of her father’s introduction to her
mother.

He died a painful death suffering from AIDS and Syphilis. He had lived his last years in
the constant fear of being shamed in the public and his family had deserted him. He
didn’t have any aides around him nor reporters covering his last moment. He died in
ignominy, purposely far away from his past in a tiny village in the Andes. He was a dying
mendicant when he had reached there and made the town famous for a while, in his
death. His ex-wife was gone a few years and the daughter had to mourn the death with
the disgrace that it brought.

He was the charming son from a Jewish clan of attorneys. A Yale Law graduate, he had
been meticulously groomed by his failed politician father to be one. His father had
forever aspired political power but couldn’t go beyond the mayor of a town in
Connecticut. The bitter man hadn’t hidden his past well and even after a record amount of
funds raised, the media had made sure that his dream career was nipped in its bud. He
was headlined for weeks across the country for his bonhomie with the mob. Even though
they couldn’t convict him in the criminal case brought out after the revelations from the
media scrutiny while he was attempting his maiden race to the Senate, he had lost
credibility. He unsuccessfully sued almost all known newspapers of the country in almost
twenty-five states for libel and didn’t win any. He had failed but he was no fool; he had
learned the lesson. He crafted a perfect politician, too cunning for his own good. He died
just in time for his son to denounce him and thus forever be secured from any negatives
of his tainted past.

The handsome son was a master orator, visionary, unassuming, shrewd, astute and
sexually deviant. He knew about everything and won a million dollars at the Senators’
Who wants to be a Millionaire. His tall frame of 6’ 2’’ was aptly proportioned and he
adorned a smile on all occasions. He had grown up observing people and trends and,
hence, had a very sharp insight into matters public. He could predict the public-sway
almost every single time. He called himself a progressive-conservative- the safe ship to
progress.

23
A very successful young attorney, he was first elected the Governor as an independent
with a very conservative agenda from the state of Massachusetts, a liberal stronghold.
After initial few years of corporate litigations, he launched himself to bigger schemes by
capturing the moment and taking the risk of supporting the yet unpopular stand against
gay marriage, which, in his correct perception, had just started losing supporters due to
the frustrated out-of-control homosexuals who had taken to violent means after the
reversal of the law legalizing gay marriage. A Jewish wedding was ransacked in the south
end of Boston, a predominantly gay neighborhood, the day court verdict came out. A
particularly homophobic police captain reacted rather unscrupulously and ended up
starting a riot in which many were killed and there was ample display of police brutality
on the homosexuals. The leaders of the community nationwide were shaken and in their
shaky state of mind forgot to throw any sympathies at the fallen Jewish groom and ranted
loud against the police action.

While other leaders from the state were preparing their reactions, Johnny Hesse had
started his processions against the mindlessness of alternative sexual orientation. He took
an open stand against the gay demand to allow them traditional matrimony and had the
public nodding with him on his well-timed television campaign lambasting the gay
motive behind their demand. He was the first one to ridicule the gay contention of
seeking sanctity of their relationships through marriage by showing footage of the
destroyed marriage and snapshots of Gay leaderships’ comments that had definitely not
been very wise and popular. The ads ended with a ‘Why Not Civil Reunion?’ message.
They hadn’t lasted for long and he was sued, unsuccessfully, by the caring organizations;
but he became known.

He was a maverick. He believed that in an era where everybody was too smart, the ways
that really worked were never the ones popularly debated. He said that he liked to find
distant red spots in the spectrum of black to white. When the major parties were debating
controlling the oil companies for checking the oil prices, he stood for leaving the oil
companies alone and tripling the investment in alternative energy generation. The
established leaders had initially ignored him but when he appeared in the media with
solid numbers before the analysts could churn them out, he surely won approval amongst
the viewers. His logic was always simple and he talked the straightforward swift tone of
one who always knew what he was saying. He confidence was caustic for his adversaries
and immediately owned others. He believed in capitalism and strictly opposed socialistic
ideas for the betterment of the society. He talked of his individual centered capitalistic
model in which a profit-capped system ran on the optimality of responsibilities. He
argued that no company or individual should be allowed to make unlimited profit for the
investors. He believed that the workers had the right over gains beyond a certain limit.
His idea of the optimality of responsibilities involved loosening the state control over
majority of socially proactive programs and instead enable individuals to shoulder the
responsibility of enhancing the society. He envisioned a society full of corporations and
non-government organizations, all operating on the result-oriented way of capitalism. He
was one of the tallest figures at the public radio and had a cult following of young
clueless minds. They loved his logically simple yet unconventional propositions. He was
media savvy and always controlled them to his advantage. His off the hook propositions

24
and analyses made a rich fodder for the unaware; and the sellers of awareness worshipped
him for that. He was a tall figure at the public radio and television as well as the most
conservative talk shows. He projected an aura of impeccable standards and stayed neutral
and focused in his criticism. Every single move was well planned and guided by his dead
old man’s spirit. For about five years, he spent all his income on activism, never
accepting a cent for talks and appearances for himself. He claimed to be bothered in his
sleep by the inadequacies of the present and sought rewards for his insights in donations
to the non-government grass root organizations. This was a master move and he had a big
band of obliged and awed campaigners when the time came for him to make the move
up.

He was known for his statistics and information. He spent a great deal of time studying
the details and discussed his knowledge in detail in the media. It was one of those
knowledge gathering missions that brought him in contact with Savannah’ research group
at Columbia. He approached the professor to educate himself on the errors in social
statistics around the time when she was working on her first year charity campaign.

She had the biggest crush of her life on the suave lawyer almost fifteen years her senior.
The professor had attached her to him, for a month, to explain him the nuances of data
gathering and the error mechanisms inherent in the current analyses. He liked her young
teacher and played his charm utmost care. In him she saw the first embodiment of her
own ideals. She had always had a disdain for individuals who argued with fundamentally
disconnected stands, for the first time she met someone who could challenge her point of
view through them. They talked endlessly on matters ranging from the philosophy of
excellence to policies of the government. And, even though he had a gentle arrogance in
his delivery, she took it as his confidence and was always awestruck. He lent her his
presence in the ad for the AIDS inflicted in Africa and persuaded the mayor of the city of
Boston to adopt the city of kumasi in its struggle against the disease and that left her
enamored like she had never been before.

‘ I am at a time in my life when I should not be ignorant towards my softer feelings. He’s
the closest to perfection in ways another human could ever be. He makes me weak in my
knees and it has to be a sign’, she wrote in her diary one of those days.

‘Today was his last day with us. I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted to kiss his lips when
he said goodbye. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been a teenager and should have expressed
myself to him. Perhaps…’ she wrote the day he left.

He had been aware of how she felt but waited for her to bake in her tender emotions. She
couldn’t hold herself and called in the public radio while he was on. He was quick
enough to seize the moment and sought her assistance in their campaign against the
inconsistencies in the public expenditure on education in the state of Massachusetts. She
was no ad maker but she agreed and he promised to get in touch with her offline for the
same.

25
She was almost in tears when Marilyn mocked her idea. She used her last weapon and
blurted out that she loved him. ‘ Politicians don’t know how to rock n’ roll baby, you are
a model’, she laughed and walked away adding, ‘all right! Do it but it will cost him’. She
paid for the agency’s services by her own savings.

He provided the material and she made a beautiful ad uncovering the political
manipulations in education spending in return for the chance to stay closer to him. He felt
the energy well but refrained from reciprocation till the time was ripe. The time ripened
towards the end of the project when he fainted due to fatigue while watching the final
version of the ad at Marilyn’s office. He had been on a personal trip to the city and had
stopped by to review the finished work. She was scared out of her wits and called the
emergency but he had come back to his senses by the water splashes on his face before
they had arrived. I was nothing serious and the paramedics advised him rest after
ensuring his vital signs were in check.

Her apartment couldn’t have been worse than that summer night when she realized that
she was in love. They had decided to walk to a diner from her work but his body was
giving up and she insisted that he crashed at her pad nearby than head back to Brooklyn
at his cousin’s. She gave him her bedroom and was terribly embarrassed at the heap of
dirty underwear on the floor. To her luck he couldn’t wait and by the time she was back
with a drink of water, he was slumped in slumber.

“The most beautiful face is resting in my bed tonight and my joy knows no bounds. I
want to scream out loud, run around in ecstasy, hold him to my chest and feel his
heartbeat. He’s a man of the world and by his age I am sure we are all past these funny
emotions, but I hope and pray that he feels even a fraction of how I feel. Am I in love?”,
she had scribbled in her diary before setting of to her dream world. She dreamt of a
thousand butterflies falling with the euphoria of weightlessness and smiled the prettiest
smile.

At the age of twenty-three, she had thought that she had found everything she could have
dreamt of by the look in the handsome politician’s eyes when he woke her up by blowing
his warm breath on hers. A steaming cup of coffee and they started a long relationship
that morning without any formal declarations. She had jumped up slightly and pecked
their first kiss on his lips at the entrance to the Penn Station and he had softly muttered
“Thank You”.

She visited her mother that evening and confided her love in her. Mama was happy and
gave her most sincere advices, which had probably worked in her days, along with the
cautionary note against premarital sex. She knew she didn’t have to resort to any of the
tricks of luring boys, whether in her mommy’s ways or the rest of the world’s; it was
different and had to be so else it wasn’t special. She took immense pride in the unusual
nature of their courtship. A relationship built on small emails asking ‘how are you’ and
confiding that your neck hurt; and the weekly conversations and the biweekly meetings

26
left a lot of room for the mind to plug its reality in. Our gentle butterfly fluttered her best
flights in her dream world and walked as if in sleep the rest of the time.

Time flew by fast and before she knew it she was done with the college and ready to
move in closer to her man who was increasingly busy in his public engagements. She still
had a couple of projects that she owed to Marilyn before her contract ended. She had
enjoyed the work immensely but was too smitten to think of furthering it. Her sole aim
was to find a job and stay near the man her body craved, in Boston.

“It’s the end of academics. I am too happy to think about Dad’s advice to continue for a
while more. I am not happy because it has ended, I am happy because I get to start a new
life now. I will be near him and maybe soon we’d be together forever. Oh! How I wish
everything between now and then evaporated in a blink of the eye,” she had written the
day she had presented her masters’ project, which was taken well and the UN eventually
implemented some of the recommended standards as well.

She had been able to secure a job with the Africa division of the UNDP at their Boston
headquarter, which she was to start in the winter, and he had found her an apartment a
block away from his own. She bid farewell to Marilyn and promised to keep in touch
with an open possibility of future collaborations. Shanti had married her childhood
sweetheart and planned to stay put with her advisor for PhD. Her husband was able to get
in the electrical engg department for his PhD and they moved in together in the university
family housing.

That was the best fall of her life. Johnny took a month and half off his busy schedule and
they set out on a tour across the country. She had wanted to go back to Africa but her
mother had suggested that she better go somewhere she could enjoy the romance. A
month and half wasn’t time enough for checking the whole country out, especially with
him. They didn’t bother with sightseeing; they preferred to stay in the bed, on a boat or in
a tent and talk. She’d rather rest in his arms and hear about places significant in different
cities than enjoy a visit; moreover, she had seen many of them already traveling as Miss
America. He seemed to have a familiarity with every city they went to: A story, an
experience everywhere She was impressed by the extensive traveler he was and gave in
to his authority in all decisions through out the travel. They talked endlessly about all sort
of things. The girl in her often wanted to hear the mushy romantic words but he preferred
discussions and knowledge sharing; she was enamored enough to forsake her desire for
sweet nothings; ‘ must be lame for a person of his stature to talk like that’, she thought.
She loved his voice more than anything else.

They came back after spending time in ten hotels, three boats, and five tents in different
cities and wildernesses. He had claimed the trip to be probably the best time in his life;
she didn’t have a single near-competitor. Back to Boston, they were greeted by some
strange accusations of a prostitute in Tennessee who claimed an affair with him on the
Jerry Springer show. He heard about it the very next day and responded on the public
radio.

27
Savannah went to her parent’s the day they got back and had her ears glued to the radio
when he came on the air. Her parents were in the same room when he expressed his
regret that there were people who would try to ruin such a beautiful time in his life just
for the sake of some extra viewership of people seeking cheap thrills. He stated that it
was the last time he was responding to such baseless inventions of rotten minds. He
moved on to describing the blissful period he was going through and how inspired he was
by the love in his life. Very confidently he announced his candidature for the
gubernatorial elections due next year; and with a pause, he shyly proposed her on the air.
She couldn’t stop her tears of joy when he shyly mentioned the words, ‘Honey, would
you marry me?’ Without a moment’s delay she called him up and accepted it in the ears
of thousands. The station was flooded by phone calls for the rest of the day. Her mother
was ecstatic and father pretended to be so; he always had a bad feeling about politicians.

He didn’t have any religious affiliation to the faith of his family and didn’t object to the
wishes of her parents, of a catholic wedding. They were married on a beautiful weekend
at the onset of winter in an eighteenth century chapel. She was wearing a beautiful dress
that she and her mother had designed themselves. The two lesbian friends, Brianna and
Shenique were the bridesmaids and wore beautiful purple outfits that were chosen by
Brianna. There were over two hundred family and friends from her side and about fifty of
close associates, radio personalities and odd family members with him. He looked like a
happy knight at the glorious moment of his life in a dark brown tuxedo.

Old professor had gone all out and hosted a grand reception on a Second World War era
warship that was permanently docked in the Hudson River. It snowed lightly that evening
and that enhanced the elaborate lighting at her parent’s home when they came back late
in the night. Having celebrated their honeymoon before the wedding, they were instead
pushed into her parents’s glittering house that had never looked more beautiful. Every
tree surrounding the house glittered in soft multicolored light as her prince charming
carried her into his arms, to their surprise, to the nuptial bed in giant butterfly house that
her parents had made under the white cypress in the backyard. Her parents had bid them
goodbye at the threshold and went to sleep at a friend’s. The lesbian friends had finely
decorated the glittering structure of translucent fiberglass and had placed a hardbound
copy of Kamasutra under the pillow with a naughty note. She was overwhelmed
throughout the ceremony and had no time to reflect upon anything around her but she
seemed more than satisfied to have lived the fairy-tale she had dreamed of.

They didn’t need to use the book when they consummated the marriage. She had been
awaiting the moment in intense anticipation for months. She screamed in pleasure as he
entered her for the first time, startling the resting butterflies outside and some fluttered
out, as if to witness her orgasm. The snowflakes stopped falling and the leaves in the
trees shook in participation as she felt her prince’s thrusts in her, each of which triggered
an explosion in her core. They screamed in unison as he came inside her and dropped his
tired torso onto hers. It took her a while to regain composure after riding the intense
waves of multiple orgasms. She felt embarrassed at the recovery and hid her face in his
chest.

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They moved in together in his house and started the conjugal life amidst the hectic
business of fundraising and running a campaign for the impending elections. She became
his rock – immersed herself completely in his business. She was his trusted lieutenant and
while he handled his engagements and speeches, she fixed the background. She discussed
his strategies with him and provided him right inputs without ever mocking his ideas, no
matter how unusual. She truly believed in him and he couldn’t have had a better
campaign manager.

Cutting the long story short, at the age of 35, he was elected the first independent
governor in the state of Massachusetts. Those were relatively more stable days in the
state and he cruised through his first term without much. His major achievement in the
first term was over 5% reduction in migration from the state. The state, which boasted of
some of the finest universities in the world, was badly struggling to retain the smallest
fraction of them. The media had further hyped the issue with all kind of data that showed
how the state was falling towards a major workforce crisis with the best increasingly
emigrating to greener pastures outside. It was, in fact, a major election issue and the
politicians had all kind of ideas on forcing the students to spend their years after the
college in the state. From mandating the graduates of state universities at least five years
of service locally to media propaganda, all kind of ideas floated in the air. He remedied
the situation by opening five technology parks and giving tax incentives to companies to
house them there.

His popularity soared amongst the public and even though lack of his direct affiliation
with either of the mainstream parties left him in no control of the legislature but he
almost always had his way, initially by taking propositions to the public; and later by
mere threat of it. By the end of his first term he was invincible in the state.

Getting elected the second time was a cakewalk. Everybody was convinced beyond an
iota of doubt about his success, so much so, that both the parties went all out in trying to
end his independent status. Stalwarts at the national level, from both sides of polity, paid
him visits and invited him to their conventions. They lavished praise on him and talked of
similarities in their agendas with his. The conservative republicans pointed out his
attachment to the tradition and pro-capitalistic views; and the liberal democrats threw
light on his progressive pursuits. He laughed at them both and agreed wholeheartedly
without ever becoming one of them. In the elections, the republicans backed him up by
not fielding their candidates; and the lame duck democrat candidate was so frustrated by
the projections that he wrapped his campaign up a month before the elections. He was
elected unopposed for all practical purposes.

He was excited; so was she. She worked for the UN and was increasingly getting
involved in AIDS projects all over the world. He was fully supportive of her ventures and
she stayed at his side whenever he needed. She had the state fund half a dozen countries
in the sub-saharan Africa in their efforts of accurate statistical estimation of the disease’s
spread. She was convinced, beyond a question, of the immediate need of the activity
world over; he shared her concern. Due to their continuous struggle against the prevalent

29
data in the society, one of the newspapers had called them a couple out on a mission to
fix the society’s perception of itself. They had liked the compliment.

Theirs was a happy marriage in their sense. Their hectic engagements didn’t leave a lot of
time for personal frivolity and she found satisfaction and utmost pleasure in his support
on matters professional. He never complained or fussed once and she saw her father in
his equipoise.

In the second term of governorship he moved on from concerns of the state to national
and international causes. There was a war going on for oil in the desert and there was
increasing disillusionment amongst the public throughout the nation. The war, which was
started as a proactive approach against terrorism after two tall buildings were reduced to
rubbles by two jumbo-jets hijacked by terrorists, had gone completely out of hands and
had completely belied its cause by further fomenting the terrorist ideologies. In years
succeeding the war it was clear that the reasons for invasion lacked realistic ground but
the politicians had been able to contain the situation by claiming intelligence failure and,
hence, a complete revamp of the country’s security and intelligence system. The
republican president had been able to get reelected due to the ignorance of the masses and
their concern for matters more immediate to them, which included the definition of
marriage, legality of abortion, respect for Christian commandments and other issues that
otherwise remained on the fringe.

However, they couldn’t blind the people forever. The proud voters of the nation couldn’t
get over the media reports declaring the war a failure. The other party minced no words
in calling it a defeat and they had the statistics on their side. The war was in its fifth year
after the declaration of victory by the jubilant president and the actual control had taken a
downward trend since then; the same was true for the casualties. When the news channels
started plotting graphs the showed exponential trends, people got the point.

They screamed out loud against the state of affairs by a complete routing of the
republicans in the midterm elections for the senate and the House of Representatives.
From a comfortable majority in both houses, they were reduced to less than a quarter of
the strength. This had rattled the party and the government and they tried to fix the
situation by a bold move of sacking the autocratic secretary of defense. Even though it
was projected as the secretary’s resignation due to health reasons, the intense media
scrutiny brought out facts rather bizarre. The sacked secretary broke down and blurted
out some high level secrets on the national television after a very serious grilling by a
talk-show host.

Governor Hesse had been at the forefront of the criticism of government’s handling of the
war from the beginning of his second term. It was his suggestion to a public radio
reporter that setout the flood of failure graphs in the media. He seized the opportunity to
launch himself at the national scene when the sorry secretary had his tearful moment on
the television. He launched a full-fledged campaign for an enquiry into the former

30
secretary’s revelation of cover-ups. The crying old guy hadn’t really revealed more than
the common knowledge of denial of the ground situation by the entire government and
the episode was initially taken with a pinch of spice by mainly the comics on the TV.
Johnny knew that this was just the beginning.

The public radio launched a fact-finding campaign the very next day. In the background,
there was an assassination attempt at the deposed secretary and that scared the living
daylight out of him and sent him running to a European country where the prime minister
was his personal friend. A journalist friend of Johnny tracked him down and broke the
concocted finding that the government wanted to eliminate him. He was incensed and
talked at length about the screw-ups and cover-ups of the administration of which he was
an active player. He talked in detail how the intelligence was deliberately misinterpreted
to suit the president’s familial hatred for the ruler and the secretary of state’s dislike for
his moustache. He explained why the there was no detailed war-plan – because nobody
wanted to think of a need for a plan. He elaborated how everybody was so madly
engrossed in being the most powerful group of individuals on this earth. He quoted
examples of the complete lack of any awareness whatsoever of the country they had gone
invading; not a single person in the conference room knew even the strength of the
enemy army when the chief executive of the country took the final decision to rumble in
the sand. He disclosed why there didn’t exist a plan for handling the mess today –
everybody’s too scared to face the reality and just wants to somehow get done with the
rest of the second term. He portrayed himself as the old guy in the gang of teenagers who
was mocked every time he tried to instill some wisdom in the madness they were all
wallowing in. He was ashamed of giving in to the peer pressure; for being human in not
being the best secretary; for desperately holding on to his position because once out of
the coterie he’d have been chewed alive by the opposition; he cried inconsolably again.

The entire interview was recorded and played thousands of time on the public radio and
television in the states. Other stations faced a serious crisis due to loss of viewers and
listeners; Johnny suggested that his friend sold the material to others and make something
of his low earning life. People were enraged like they had never been before. The rushing
crowd to czar Nicholas’ palace on the streets of Moscow, the throng asking for food
outside Mary Antoinette’s balcony in Paris, the determined soldiers of non-violence
overwhelming the British government on the streets in India, the congregation demanding
civil rights for blacks, the brave students backing up the resolute girl who stood in front
of a tank on a Beijing Street – all of them fell short in their comparative magnitude to
what the Pennsylvania street of Washington DC saw a week after the interview was first
aired. People poured in from everywhere, including Canada and Mexico, in response to
Johnny’s call for a peaceful end to the stupidity of the current rule. The police and the
rapid action force watched amuck as millions flooded the road to the white house to seek
answers, nay, to provide an answer.

The president was at the John after a particularly heavy brunch that beautiful Sunday
morning. He had been well aware of the developments and his advisors, the top-notch
spin-doctors, were sweating hard spinning the situation back in control. But, it had been
enough. This momentum was such that any who didn’t subscribe to the mass disgust

31
didn’t dare speak against it either. The streets and hangouts were no more open to debates
and speculations about the state of affairs; the state had clearly lost control of its affairs
and it was high time democracy was exercised in the truest sense of the word. The macho
cowboy forgot to wipe his behind when an aide blurted the reality outside to him from
outside the bathroom. A dirty-assed president tried to play dirty again and called the
security chief. The shaken chief couldn’t muster courage to seek army’s help to rout the
hurricane that was brewing outside.

Johnny Hesse became a superhero in the country after his famous speech on how
integrity of the nation depended on that of its citizen, the individuals. He was introduced
by the super-journalist to the ocean of heads desperate to take things in their hands. He
started with requests for control of emotions and went on to admonish those collected. He
blamed the voters for everything that had taken place in the country and they needed to
know that.

“What we know today is no news. There is nothing new in the interview that has you so
incensed. Nothing has changed in vision; it’s the perception that has altered. Why???
Why are we suddenly so aware of the evil that has been ruling us? Why are the words of
a deposed and sorry politician under extreme pressure so caustic to tear through the shell
of ignorance we had been hiding under? - Because in accepting the follies of his band of
crooks, the despicable scoundrel has put a serious question mark on our system’s
integrity, on our integrity. We are all creatures of convenience and big words such as
integrity and accountability don’t strike us unless they are struck on us, but not one of us
wants to live with the realization of being any less integral, any less accountable in the
steps we take.

More important than the fate of this government is the fate of us individuals residing in
this masterpiece of nature, without an argument the best country on this earth. It’s a time
of crisis for everybody who saw it all happening and let it happen or didn’t do enough to
check the madness. Its time for all of us to think: time for us to maintain the right balance
of the human factor in this system of ours. We need to act without leadership or
directions from outside today. Each of us needs to step up and face the situation. Lets all
of us, for once, prove to ourselves that even though far away from ideal we haven’t lost
that instinct to keep pursuing our ideals…” towards the end of his half an hour speech he
proposed, “everybody who felt betrayed and was bothered should go back home and
pick something that bothered him/her in their local scheme of things and take one
healthy, justifiable and honorable step of an integral human being because that is what we
are. We are not fractions; each of us is a complete individual in themselves and its time
we crawled towards that completeness – now”.

The speech was hailed as the biggest eye-opener to the masses in this new century. It was
placed in the league with Luther King’s dream of equality and Jawahar Lal’s hailing a
newborn nation. It worked both ways – the lazy and wavering frail masses were rattled
enough to really start feeling responsible for their collective actions; and Johnny Hesse
became a household name. Savannah couldn’t have been prouder of her husband.

32
The democrats realized the gravity of the situation (the republicans realized so too but
any politician with even the slightest understanding of these matters knew that the
proverbial shit had hit the fan and they had better kept mum) and constituted a fast track
committee to investigate the charges that could have led to impeachment and trial of the
certain pillars of governance. The charges were treason and maladministration against the
president and his entire cabinet of secretaries.

The committee, consisting of two retarded judges known for their non-partisan stand,
interviewed all the undersecretaries and then the secretaries; and didn’t find much new in
their investigation. This was one of those cases where all the fears and rumors had proven
to be true. The confidential transcripts of high-level meetings were ordered released and
they painted a rather comical picture of the government functioning. The elaborate report,
which the ex-judges produced within less than two months, was important in one sense
that it detailed how the best of the systems, with all kinds of checks and balances, fall flat
on their face when afflicted by individual inadequacies. The report did a painstaking
work in listing over hundred instances of incompetence in over six years of governance –
from blatant ignoring of available data and impulsive decisions to persistent spinning of
issues. One particular undersecretary had revealed how meticulous the doctoring used to
be. The vice-president was exposed to be extraordinarily diabolic with a macho attitude
and tendency to never smile. They had taken every data and raped it till there was
something redeeming in it for them. One spin, for example, was so smooth that it fell the
damn accuser in the vice-presidential debate during their second election, on the national
TV. He had dared include the casualties suffered by the defending nation’s army as part
of the American allies’ deaths, in reaching the percentage figure – the captured nation
was an ally of the invaders in a fight against itself. The judges had remarked that it was
quite sad that the country had needed a commission to be discerning at such crude levels.

The house impeached the president and a majority of his cabinet by overwhelming
majority – for the first time in the history of democracies was an entire administration
impeached for maladministration… incompetence, far below average, stupid… whatever
one calls it. The band of idiots sang their last tune and accused the democrats of
doctoring the entire issue in the most despicable manner. The democrats shouted from the
senate that they are going to convict the scoundrels. The numbers were not on their side
so the theater of absurd finally wrapped up the show without making the curtain call; they
were really afraid of the brickbats.

The portly speaker of the house became the president as per the hierarchy of presidential
ascension. He had extreme leftist tendencies and in the less than a year and half that he
served the position, he worsened the situation further by a mindless pullout of troops. The
democrats turned out to be extremely myopic in their hasty decision to pull the troops out
of the desert nation in three year; and to leave the mad citizens there killing each other
with double gusto. The casualty-graph maintained its steep ascension even when the
pullout process had been initiated. People were still clueless.

33
Savannah had the first glimpse of what lied underneath when she got pregnant. The
governor announced his presidential aspirations with the news of his wife’s pregnancy
during his weekly public address on the radio. In a particularly passionate address he
offered to sacrifice his family life for the nation. He ascribed a strong faith in his wife
who he believed would remain being his rock. She wasn’t happy. She had planned a few
years away from public life, to raise their kid, after his second term was over; she had in
fact sort of planned the pregnancy towards that time only. She just wasn’t prepared to
shoulder the entire responsibility of raising another human being all by herself. Her
mother held the same view and her father couldn’t believe it and repeated his fears about
politicians once again.

They fought for the first time that night. He had his mind made-up and instead of being
sympathetic to her concerns and fears, he was surprised that she’d be so concerned about
herself to not see the benefit of the masses. For the first time his confidence and
condescension scared her. His concern for the society so strongly stank of his careless
ambition to her. It was true, he wanted to rule more than any other thing. He was his
failed father without the failure. The old man had endured a lot of indignation including
the pre-knowledge of public denouncement by his son after his death; and the son
couldn’t have betrayed his father’s dreams for the sake of his progeny. He had seen the
old man cry tears of helplessness and he was stopping nowhere short of taking those tears
to the highest level possible; so high that they disseminated before wetting the son below.

She stayed mad for a week at her parent’s and didn’t answer his calls. He religiously
called every night but never left a message. Instead he talked on the radio how his wife
was unhappy because of his decision. He proclaimed his love for her on the air and she
was flooded with messages from everywhere in no time. It really moved her to receive
more than tens of thousands of emails, mails and phone calls from everywhere in the
country. Some of them sympathized with her and some begged her to change but almost
all agreed that he was a wonderful man and would make just the president this country
needed. She grew suspicious of her motives; she thought that she was selfish and a drama
queen. She loathed herself and amidst this incredible confusion took his call late one
night and felt all the more sorry when he talked of his tired bones and increasing blood
pressure. She decided that she’d be a brave wife to a brave husband and went back home.

He had her take it easy during his presidential campaign. She was happy to know of
progress through TV broadcasts and his phone calls twice daily. They didn’t talk much in
the nights he came home to sleep because he would be so tired but she understood. She
kept herself in check while going to the doctor’s appointments with her mother. She saw
his confident face on the television and heard his voice amidst scores of other voices; and
repeated to herself that she loved a public man.

The public man was busy with his campaign. He had joined the fray much later than the
party candidates but his support base was already established. He raised over a hundred
million in campaign funds within a few months and most it came through individual
contributions of less than five thousand dollars each. He was able to get voluntary
signatures from the required numbers in all states and maintained his lead in the sample

34
polls released by the media. Six months before the polls it was just he and the incumbent
replacement president in the fight. The republican candidate was constantly performing in
single digit and their convention was marred by lack of attendance and extreme mockery
in the media.
The presidential debates were ridiculous one sided. The first one had both democrats and
the republican debating it with Johnny and Johnny was some debater. He had to rush to
the venue from her wife in the hospital 10 states away and he just made it in time.
Savannah couldn’t help her pride when he routed the other two effortlessly. He proved
their every data wrong and he had detailed numbers for every plan he proposed. He had
the republican nerve-wreck agreeing with him like a little poodle by the end of the show;
he wasn’t invited for the subsequent one. The proud president was seen fumbling on the
camera in response to Johnny’s new ideas. He proposed radically novel ideas and the
media analysts liked them all. From his proposal of privatizing the social security and
enforcement of profit cap on important life saving drugs to trifurcation of the civil war
torn sand-state and management of its oil by a capitalistic conglomerate, he couldn’t have
had a wrong plan in his head those days, such was his allure.

She delivered a beautiful baby girl and he had made sure to be there for a brief while so
that the cameramen could snap his pictures with the baby. She received thousands of
cards and good wishes and notes that asked to hang on.

Moving on, he won the electoral votes from every single state in the country and for the
first time after the very first one, an independent was elected president of the united states
– POTUS as the secret services acronymed it. He was happy, she was happy, the rest of
the nation was happy.

He ran a successful presidency and stayed in control of the situation. He was credited
with bringing about an end to the fiasco in the Middle East. Even though not
unanimously praised, he was able to stop the chain of violence in that country and bring
the American troops back home. The near triangular country supported its entire
population in the basin of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, flowing parallel along its
eastern side. The southwestern region west of the river Euphrates was desert and
contained world’s second largest petroleum reserves. He trifurcated the country in
regions based on religious/ethnic grounds. The top north went to the Kurds, the center to
the Sunnis and the down south to the majority Shiites. Permanent bases were established
in Kurdistan and Southern Iraq, which were much friendlier than the Central Iraqi Sunnis,
who were trapped in the middle with extensive border control all along their perimeter.
The oil was divided in the way he had promised in his manifesto. In the famous division,
hailed by the home media, the oil in the south was governed by a board of five corporate
representatives from the biggest buyers, whose contracts were to be renewed every five
years by the oil ministry and no two of which could have been from the same country,
five representatives of the countries that the oil companies represented, representatives of
the three Iraqi countries and the oil minister of Southern Iraq, who acted as the chair. The
group was to work on a two-third-majority basis with the final decisions of pricing and
production subject to OPEC approval. The nine government representatives had powers

35
to initiate changes and the corporations could only vote, their approval or otherwise, on
those. The two countries up north were to receive the difference between their production
and their projected consumption, as approved by the governing board, for free forever;
and the profit became the Shiite revenue. This was a very complicated system and was
suspected to fall prey to the tangles of bureaucracy and corruption but he trusted what he
called the closed loop feedback. It did work. More than anything else, it was too
complicated for a majority of people to get any understanding of it, just like he had
wanted.

The division was definitely not the most popular move but by that time there were few
true nationalists left in that country. The fact that the violence was somewhat checked
and the Americans were no longer on the streets everywhere had the common gentry
accept it as a bittersweet deal and stop fussing about it.

In America it proved to be really popular and he came out a statesman after the entire
division was completed in about two years. He had a very fine balance of political
affiliations in his cabinet and his lobbying on issues was very direct and open to the
media; those who wished against his bills better had a good reason for it. He was never
afraid to talk back but always maintained a very dignified response, never passed a
judgment and kept himself aware and responsive of criticism, which he had many. One of
the main criticisms of his first term was a complete diversion of federal focus from
socially emotional issues, like the state welfare aid, to what he termed, more immediate
and impact-promising issues, like AIDS and employment generation. He declined a stand
away from the status quo on the issue of abortion, clearly stating that this was something
to be done at municipal level; a government far away in the center shouldn’t have any
opinion in favor or against medical practices. Similarly for stem cell research, he didn’t
promote direct research on stem cell production but at the same time didn’t throw any
restrictions on disease focused researches i.e. if a doctor believed that there was promise
in certain stem cells for the cure of a certain disease, they were free to pursue such
research from the grants for the disease it promised to cure. He shot back and even
rebuffed reporters who tried to drag him into what he called personal matters that should
have been of the least concern to the state. He promoted systems that let individuals
govern their own destiny within a fair playfield. The social security was semi-privatized
via mutual fund investment in top five most popular sectors, which were to be chosen by
all who paid the tax, every election year. The operation worked on complete withdrawal
of the funds to the much stable money markets in case of more than fifteen percent drop
in the investment any given quarter. The managing company needed voters’ acceptance
to reinvest. This approach worked rather well and the exchequer reported a much-relaxed
future of the baby-boomers’ retirement umbrella.

The more he grew politically big the pettier he got with his family. It started bugging
Savannah how he had completely lost interest in intercourse with her after the birth of
their daughter. She also realized how he was open in his limited affection for the baby.
He hardly held her for the fear that she might have wet his suit or he might have infected
her soft skin. He promoted Savannah’s AIDS efforts to every extent possible and always
supported her initiatives but all of them started to appear as condescending actions that

36
were more out of his need to keep her away from him rather than indulge in her. He
maintained his charmingly deriding tone in face of opposition to his ideas from her as
well. She saw no difference between the president Johnny and the husband Johnny. She
maintained her sanity in caring for little Caroline and promotion of AIDS research and
awareness.

He lived his trip. He had an inner coterie of advisors who he had taken to trusting over
the years; they knew him pretty well and always came up with ideas they knew he’d like.
One such was his deputy chief of staff, a handsome playboy from his college days who
had stuck with him all the years of his political career. Everybody in the world knew of
their camaraderie and friendship but little did they have any inkling of how close they
were.

Little Caroline grew up in the white house, fairly distant from her father. The mother
never spoke a word against the indignation she felt due to his loss of interest in her; but it
broke her heart to see her baby suffer the same. The baby absorbed this alienation well
and grew uncontrollably restless every time he held her for the media to show. It helped
him keep the infant further away. He never indulged Savannah enough on these matters
for her to even make an issue of it to him; he always smiled and knew just when to get
silent. The confidant young girl without a romantic affiliation had been transformed into
a subdued cat of a first lady, hardly in the company of the person that defined her status.

His glorious first term ended with much accolades and fanfare. He ran for the office again
and came out with over 65% of popular votes. His wife was the saddest first lady at her
parents’ house that morning. She had been increasingly staying with her parents over the
weekend in the same old Victorian house where she had earned to dream and had seemed
to lose it now. Something about the feeling of contention- it drives the dreams away.
Having lived the colors of her dream and fluttered onto the ideal that she had initially
thought him to be, she had slowly lost her nigh-time wanderings – her escape as well as
her training. She loved the nostalgia that the colors on the trees and the much-reduced
number of butterflies reflected.

In his second term he turned international. His policy was to engage with every adverse
nation on every single issue. He responded to every valid criticism of his ideas and made
very perceptible and swift changes in his policies in light of them; but at the same time,
he grew increasingly stern in his responses to those who didn’t care to listen or follow
him. An Arab prince threatened blockade of oil sales and he stripped the poor sheikh
naked in front of the media; he had every bit of information in his heart about the
Sheikh’s wonder management of their Oil. He was able to impress the leader of Iran in
the first meeting of leaders from the two countries by his immaculate knowledge of their
culture and concerns. He always met foreign heads of states one on one and spent a
considerable amount of time on research, as he had always been. The wily old leader
from India was taken aback to find beautiful Rajnigandha flowers on their conference
table and when Johnny started reading him a translation of one of his poems featuring the
flower, the emotional poet forgot his complaints and accusations that he had been so
prepared with.

37
Johnny played a key role in dismantling NATO and instead entered into alliances with
continental unions. His vision of the world saw very close knit and open cooperation
between continental and sub continental nations and then a broader understanding
between union bodies representing the continents. He believed in a world order based
solely on the selfish interest of these broad unions. He had argued that a nation by itself
was too clustered a unit of similar interests to be indulging in economic negotiations with
each other, given the serious inequality in power and resources; the mutual involvement
had to be either through multinational corporations or the bigger unions which were
much better placed to bargain with the each other for their member states. He fully
supported strengthening of the UN and voted for the increase of permanent members in
the Security Council. He was liked by many and couldn’t be refused by any. He was a
sucker for approval and the ever-high ratings kept him going strong.

Like everything else about him, his deviance had grown over the years as well. He liked
to play god and had a strong fetish for domination. The good ol’ deputy chief of staff was
his bitch since the time they had been roommates in the college dorm. The handsome
playboy to the world was nothing but the most devoted servant to his master for whom he
would have done anything – from walking around with a butt-plug in him for days to
killing any prostitutes that might have developed an inkling of the president’s identity.
Between them, they had a very twisted game of subservience and control going on. To be
the only one who knew of his omnipotent master’s total reality and to have a complete
control of a person’s innermost thoughts and desires were their respective rewards. They
lived in complete conformance to their role where they were each other’s sole
responsibility. The playboy had turned thus just to cater to his master’s desire of control
over other’s orgasms and desires. He wooed and cohabited ladies and made love to them
under constant instruction of his master who watched his every activity through a tiny
camera embedded at multiple places in his rooms and clothing. He always wore an
earphone and performed whatever the master sought of him as whims of his own
conscience. The president’s favorite pastime involved watching his slave remotely, living
under his perfect control. Every once in a while the faithful aide would get him
prostitutes when they’d be in places far away – they indulged in weird role-playings,
which invariably involved him, in a mask, debasing the other participants; he especially
enjoyed controlling pain.

What had started as the curious domination had transformed into an addiction and by the
time he was through the presidential years, it had become his passion. Came a point
where he started craving more and different. He started pushing his boy to get him variety
and in one of those variety sessions he sowed the seed of his downfall by focusing on
dictating the studly gigolo over his toy of years; the superservient toy was jealous. It
continued for a few times more and the jealousy turned into anger.

38
They were back in Massachusetts and leading a rather unhappy family life raising their
little daughter who Savannah was desperately trying to keep normal. Johnny had gone
more and more reclusive to his family even though he played his responsibilities all right.
It had been years since they had had a heart to heart talk and as much as she had hated to,
she smelled rat. The rodent surfaced when she received an anonymous email warning her
of contents in her husband’s computer. She lost her breath when she checked it out.

She was shell shocked at volumes of videos and images of her favorite aide, the most
affable David McCarthy, in bizarre footings of bondage and domination. She almost
threw up after forcing herself through just a couple of them. To find such sick and
perverted footages on her husband’s computer had her entire world come crashing down.
She lost herself for the first time.

Johnny stayed calm throughout the outburst and then with his characteristic smile started
with an apology as if he had it scripted in advance,

‘Honey, my extreme apologies to you for bringing such smut in our house but sometimes
we have to deal with the perversion of others around us. I know that we don’t have any
business digging in other’s private affairs but now that someone had obtained such
evidences of perversion, which on part of my aide could, potentially, make my life
miserable. I know that Carol could have accidentally ran into them but I had figured that
my personal computer was the best place to keep these as wrapped up as possible. Did
you see many of them? David certainly has some skeletons in his closet. I was going to
talk to you about him. What do you think I should do?’

Something didn’t feel right to her. Even though the story seemed plausible, she couldn’t
understand who would email her about it and how would someone else know about it?

‘Was it Caroline?’ ‘Was she snooping around in her Dad’s computer?’

Caroline was strictly prohibited from touching her dad’s computer and that set one of the
early divisions between her and her dad.

David didn’t deny when she confronted him. She kept asking what should be done to
him; and he kept repeating,”As the master desires”. He had called Johnny Master
publicly for the first time and Savannah found it eerie. Her head was spinning and was it
anger or disgust or the element of uncertainty or confusion, she collapsed, in David’s
hurriedly stretched arms right before she was to hit the floor.

Johnny was not happy. He asked David how Savannah had got to know about the videos;
she never touched his personal computer. David took the responsibility with his old
servility. Had Savannah come to senses just a few seconds earlier, she’d have known a
lot; David was ordered to end himself. Johnny ordered his last command and declared
David free of his bondage.

David laid Savannah’s semi conscious body on the couch; paid the last body-down
obeisance and quietly walked out of the door.

39
Having put her to sleep, Johnny came to his computer and watched David shoot himself
in the head in his car on a quiet side street, before removing every scrap of evidence.
Johnny had known it coming and was prepared for the eventuality. It hurt him to lose
David but his plan dictated such. He wrote a wordy obituary and decided to stay off the
past for good.

Something changed in Savannah after that day. She started drinking. It somehow felt
good and she liked how she could get away from her sober mind, which was full of
shock, sadness and confusion. Within weeks she started drinking a lot. She practiced the
first guile of her life to her little daughter, by hiding her Gin and Tonic in Sprite bottles. It
was supposed to be hidden from Johnny as well but Johnny knew all about it; he stayed
quiet.

Her mother’s turmoil wasn’t hidden from Carol and she also noticed the stark mismatch
between her parent’s composure.

‘Why’s Daddy smiling when Mommy’s so sad?’ she thought.

Her confusion alienated her further from her father. She developed an intense distrust for
him at a very early stage in her life and it showed in her actions. She was good at school
and a well-behaved kid in general. Hence, there weren’t many confrontational moments
between them but he could never have her bring him a book or a glass of water or his
glasses. She even disproved of him coming to pick her up at her school; it caused a lot of
commotion there, she said. She dumped any toys that he brought in a cupboard in her
room that she never opened. She secretly wished it all along that her Daddy would once
try to bridge the gap, but her Daddy maintained his nonchalance and stayed the same – a
smiling cold man.

He did try to reach out to her, in his own way. The only way of getting close to his
daughter that he knew of, was to unnecessarily meddle in her affairs. He thought that he
could make a good father by dictating a twelve year old how to sit, stand, talk and play.
Every time he forced his ways on her, she responded by getting back to him in her way

He had been keeping himself busy with a number of engagements including lectures,
visits and inaugurations. Savannah hadn’t been as actively involved in her projects since
they had moved out of the white house and with Carol getting increasingly busier in her
own life, Savannah had been feeling the need to start working.

One fine morning in Tennessee, he suggested to her that she took to public life. She
wasn’t so certain but that did get her thinking in this direction. She figured that if she was
destined to live a life of such alienation from her husband, she had better put her
association to some good use for herself. She excitedly broke the news to her parents in

40
one of her weekly visits. Her mother was happy for the spark in her eyes and her father
once again called politics dirty business. Her daughter was excited at her excitement.

Johnny diffused his wife’s increasing prodding into his life by giving her something to
do. He announced her candidature for senate at a pompous release of the UNDP report on
AIDS. He showered praise on her and called her the most honest and integral person he
had known. She was her rock and he supported like one in her every pursuit to make the
world a better place. She blushed for the camera and began her political career.

She was elected to the senate without much hassle and soon established herself as a fine
orator, almost as good as her husband. Her stand on different issues was in synch with her
husband’s and thus she inherited his following; and worked with enthusiasm to not let
them down. She still looked beautiful and had created quite a sensation in the tabloids by
her election. ‘The most beautiful Politician on this earth’ is how some described her.
Quite often, some of those obese seasoned ugly politicians would melt like butter by one
smile of hers. At the subconscious level she loved the power. She felt complete again.

At the other hand, Johnny had started feeling it. In efforts to save himself, he had
distanced himself from levels of control. He wasn’t the president anymore and it wasn’t
the same now, trying to have his ways. The public still heard him but there weren’t many
ways he could watch them dance to his tunes. He had happily set her wife on a course
away from his demons but that meant a complete loss of control. His daughter wasn’t in
his control at all. His slave was gone as well. He missed David and indulged in some
unscrupulous activities in moments of intense desire to get a replacement.

One such was the rendezvous with an underage prostitute in the distant land of Algeria
that sowed the seed of the curse in him. But that came much later. It was preceded by few
years of abject desperation and restlessness that had found release in constantly degrading
perversion. Now that he had lost his conduit for such releases, he took to scrounging
online for whatever little he could. One role-playing led to another and he discovered
solace in playing control over roles of his daughter. What he couldn’t achieve in the
teenaged girl at home, he started seeking online. Having lost all sense of judgment, he
turned into a predator.

His first encounter with a teenaged girl had been in the holy land of Jerusalem. He was
careful enough to not indulge with any local kids and had planned this one meticulously.
He was on a trip to resolve the remnants of the Middle East conflict, where he had
traveled without aides, as he normally did. The little girl knew that he was somebody
important but had no clue of his identity. She met him in the lobby of a small hotel after
he missed his flight back. He hadn’t felt better in years and the very first one got her
addicted. He made it a habit to prey on kids in far away countries; occasionally even
picking them from streets in the red-light districts of third world countries. He contracted
the virus in the warm summer night following the day of reconciliation between the
fighting factions in the Algerian Civil War. She was sent as a traditional masseuse and
her tolerance for pain enhanced his pleasure. He contracted syphilis, later, somewhere in
the Far East.

41
Such was the trip of his only source of pleasure. He committed the same sin that his
father had raised him warning every day of their years together. He got carried away and
violated the earliest wisdom he had been imparted. He didn’t cover his back. More than
that, he forgot that he could be trapped as well.

He was almost busted in the public had it not been for the aggravation of situation in the
Middle East. His activities were not really as discrete as he had liked to believe,
intelligence agencies of at least six countries had been aware of his sickness. One that
knew the most about him were the Jews in Mossad who had his first and most favorite
prey working for them. They had also been aware of the intense interest the journalists
had in his affairs and the series of string operations that were under execution. They had
to act when they found out the elaborate plans of a particular group of newsmongers. He
wielded considerable influence over the Arabs and the government of Israel didn’t want
him defaced because they had to leverage his goodwill. So, they, instead, warned his wife
to rein him in control.

She had suspected infidelity and perversion for long; and had realized for quite a while
that what they had was more of a practical arrangement for the sake of their daughter and
her career. It was ironic how her daughter was happier and her career had soared when he
was gone.

She felt sick to the core as she dug into him. She had started losing interest in him long
ago but she still stayed loyal to him in her mind and deeds. He was still the little catholic
girl’s prince albeit turned frog now. She felt sorry for him and it took a lot of courage in
her to confront him.

She didn’t care for how he reacted and just wanted to get over with it. She knew of his
syphilis and felt glad that he hadn’t touched her all these years when she herself tested
negative. He was naïve enough to have no clue himself of what he was carrying. He had
never suspected that the emissions from his member could be sign of a sexually
transmitted disease. He tried to act defiant initially but the moment she threatened to go
public with his details, he saw end.

She let him live almost a week in the fear of being exposed. He stayed holed up in the
house because she didn’t allow him out; she was in control. For the first time in his life,
he was forced to halt and contemplate his fast life. His convolutions freaked him out and
in the intense anxiety and depression that ensued he lost his mental balance. She found
him lying naked in the empty bathtub when she came home from the capital. She knew
that he was over; he had to get out and vanish.

His wife announced his retirement from public life with intense sadness. He appeared on
a talk show on the television a couple of days later, looking frail and absent minded and
talked about his hidden alcoholism and plans to spend some years in a recovery facility in
the Andes, removed from the public eyes.

42
The day he found out that he was suffering from AIDS, he quietly left his rest home in a
beautiful ski-town in eastern Chile. He eventually died incognito after suffering for many
years. He could never act on the millions of impulses he had to end himself.

The intelligence agencies, government and even the media knew his details to one extent
or the other but nobody talked a word about it. Some shock jocks cracked a joke or two
on their perverted hero but the society as a whole was too shocked to think of anything
about it. People had had enough of fallen heroes in the modern days – there were priests
molesting kids, politicians doing interns, corporation bigwigs doing everybody; this one
people just wanted to forget about. Everybody was afraid to attempt reconciliation.

When he had disappeared, the president himself, who was once very close to Johnny, had
explained the situation to Savannah and had suggested that it was better for the country to
let that dirty rat drown in the oblivion. They concocted a parting note from the maverick
ex-president -

“Enough of all attention, enough of the struggle to change. I forsake all that was me and
drift into anonymity to embrace my end. Please don’t seek me out.”

Caroline had been waiting for the day. She received a call from the secretary of state
notifying her of her father’s demise in a remote Chilean village.

‘Scoundrel. I know it was painful for him’, she had said with a sigh.

Old secretary didn’t know what to tell her and curtly asked if she wanted a public service
arranged. She answered in negative.

‘He doesn’t deserve to be remembered in a service. If you could, I want to talk in the
media. I have waited for years to tell her story.’

He fixed her an interview with a primetime news program anchor and there, she talked a
story that no fiction could have emulated. She spoke for over four hours to the bemused
hostess and out came this extraordinary tale of pettiness and vanity, extraordinary lives
succumbing to the most ordinary designs, individuals destined to the sin of others, a Full
Circle of events – all meaningless in the end.

She recalled how her mother was branded crazy when she vanished and how her father
was the man of the century; how her ascent in love was considered self destructive and
hormonal and his descent in power was one of the best things to have happened to the
country; how she was portrayed a destroyer in death and he has been just kept mum
about. The collective had failed the individuals. Conscience is a very personal thing and
never should there be any misgivings about the “collective conscience”; there ain’t none
by definition.

43
 His Story

Meeting Damru was the most amazing thing to have happened to Caroline’s mother. He
had kept his word and called her up from the Humboldt County in Northern California
where he had landed to participate in the famous Reggae festival - Reggae on the river.
They talked briefly in which he invited her for the show as his personal guest.

‘Come Madaam, I show you how Rasta celibate in this country’.

She canceled her campaign and took the next flight to California. Some 200 miles north
of the city of San Francisco, Humboldt County is situated along “the lost coast”. The
beautiful county in the northwest California is known for sandy beaches, giant redwood
forests and free spirit. Known for some of the kindest marijuana in the nation, it also
boasts of crime free and loving communities. An obvious location, it hosted one of the
finest roots reggae traditions in the country. On the bank of the river Eel, some 25000
members of the Reggae Family camped in a beautifully rustic communal setting for three
days in early august heat to celebrate the rhythm of ‘One World, One Love’, every year.
All big names of the Reggae Family of musicians congregated to share their vibrations
with each other. The wilderness reverberated with chants of despair, hope and prayers to
Jah accompanied with forlorn melodies dancing to the upbeat spirit.

‘Reggae is more than music, its more than a way of life, its the philosophy of integrity of
existence. Its finding rhythm in the most mundane as well as the most depressing
realities; its putting it all together. The unifying idea of a world in which ‘you’ is ‘I’, the
trust in an entity to liberate them of bondage and suffering, the simple belief in
conditioning the body temple through extremely prohibitory I-tal diet, the sanctity of
marijuana as a herb paving the path to the Jah – such “overstanding” of these dreded
Rastafari makes them utterly simple and free souls. Having established their faith in the
ultimate, these wonderful people know nothing more than the quest for rhythm. They
have a grace in the slightest tap of their fingers. They reach out with every word they say.
They make you move with every beat. I, the most ignorant about this music, could feel
every spasm of their tunes gushing in through pores of my entire body, permeating inside
me from head to toe, setting me to wings on my effortless flutter through the firmament. I
have never felt so together with everything around me. It’s impossible to not move to this
groove. I, the future president of this country, was swaying with the gay abandon of a
youth. I felt young once again.

Then He… He is so different yet so much a part of it. His music is different but it still fits
in the grove of his fellow musicians. He speaks differently but never stands out. He
dresses like them but a little more somber than other bigwigs. He is everything and more
than what my fancy had presumed. He’s the embodiment of perfection. His words glide
out in perfectly accented tones that even though from lands far away, sound so close to
my heart. Nuances of his being are exemplary in every sense of understanding. He is
amazingly powerful and hasn’t a clue about it. For a moment I was reminded of Johnny
and it was reassuring to notice the contrast in the nature of their influence. He never talks
about problems and ways to solve them; he doesn’t have any plans or schemes; he just

44
talks about music and richness in life. People come from the world over to watch this
reclusive child beat his drums and he dispenses them all off by calling it just a show. ‘I
juss capture dem beats from around I and fool dem brothers and sisters for leetlewhile,’
he always says. He sees beats in the air, on the trees, floating on the water, even when he
is not stoned. He had brought with him over fifty sick kids from Africa and he was one of
them. They performed a wonderful beat sequence he called ‘Bhairav-nad’ - call to the
Bhairav. Bhairav is the fearsome aspect of Shiva, he told me. Jokes that if he could keep
the angry lord happy, he won’t have nothing to worry about except living the life. Such
innocence in his devotion made the grotesque little figure of his god, which he carries
with him, look radiant and beautiful. How much I wished he were all for me only but a
man of his stature and personality doesn’t have much time for personal indulgences. I
wish I could have taken one deep look in my eyes. He was extremely receptive of me and
quite warm and affectionate as well but that can’t be a sign that he likes me at a personal
level; he’s the same with everybody.

He has never been known to involve himself with any girls. He has never expressed any
desire either way. Interviewers ask him and he giggles like a teenager at the idea. Says
that he loves dem all but would only marry the one his grandmother would approve; she
is dead. He is so real yet seems so unreachable at this time. I don’t want to let go of my
dreams and he seems to be the reason behind them; I can’t let go of him. Nothing else
matters.’

Caroline had read this entry from her mother’s diary about her stay with Damru and his
Rasta brothers at the Reggae on the river. To the surprise of everybody, she flew in just
the next morning, much to the local official’s chagrin. Her campaign manager had called
in the local law enforcement behind her and they were there to receive her the moment
she landed at the tiny county airport. Damru received her with a pleasant surprise and his
face lit up when she mentioned that she planned to checkout the entire festival if they
could get her a ticket. One man who seemed to be a promoter of the event took Damru
aside and whispered something in his ears. Damru came back and said,

‘Dem people no want you harm and Dem no want policeman. I say your sekoority inna
hand of bhairav. Welcome to da fameelee’.

She ended up camping out with them for the next two and half days when her campaign
manager himself arrived there to take her back. They had set her up a nice tent near
Damru’s and provided her a seat in the front row, which she kicked aside when he took
the stage the first evening. She ate the I-tal diet with them and had no clue that she had
ingested a considerable amount of marijuana that she had consumed in the pumpkin
breads and the curry stews that they had cooked. A lot of how she felt could have been
the effect of the ganja in her system but she was a changed person when she came back
from the reggae festival.

First the campaign manager got a mindful for showing up there, next, the reporters
received the simple ‘ I like Reggae’ when they insisted on a reason for her being there.
She was extensively photographed, most of it without her knowledge or concern. She

45
didn’t care when they started publishing her pictures with the Rasta and started passing
their speculative judgments on the entire episode. Some praised the free-spirited
politician while others called it irresponsible. Few comics had started seeing romance in
the air and their chests pumped out with pride when within a couple of weeks, just a
fortnight before the presidential elections, she relinquished her career and abdicated the
still winning chance of American presidency.

By then the media had already started her execution. She became an object of ridicule
when days before the elections, all there was about her in the press or on the air focused
on her past and her unconventional romance with Damru. It only fanned her desires and
had her falling to deeper levels. She despised the media and having known her husband’s
manipulation of it, she held very low regards for people’s source for news and
information. Its mass attack on her produced a very sharp reaction from her – She refused
to say anything. She didn’t deny nor did she accept anything; just gave a look of disdain
for the incessant chain of interviewers. They captured such looks well and made more
front-page shots.

After her announcement all hell had broken loose. Analysts, columnist and commentators
that never had enough of her sharpness and savvy turned into hateful critics and prodded
every bit of her living including her husband. She was branded a fallen catholic and a
rather sad example of infidelity to the country’s youth. This had renewed country’s
interest in Johnny. The powers that be had complete information of his whereabouts and
a lot about his deviant past, but it had been an unwritten state policy to maintain his status
of a hero of the country. As the media leaked odd tidbits about his yet unknown past,
people got mum and focused on the prey at hand. One of the rare cases of collective
psychology where a scandal like his failed to snowball; charged by the public’s
embarrassment, the initial flakes of information repelled attention to the issue. Talk show
hosts focused on Savannah with all the more deliberation. So many saw this as the innate
feminine emotional instability and sighed at the prospects if the romance had happened
after she was the first female president of the country. Her supporters and campaign
officials were baffled and their frustration had given way to resentment at their
candidate’s refusal to respond to anything relevant. She just took herself off the campaign
and asked her manager to take all of her engagements off the list for an indefinite period
of time one day not too long after her reggae experience.

After spending a week in San Francisco, where he recorded an album with a university of
Berkley professor and played a couple of shows, Damru paid visit to Savannah in the
east. She had been living in a trance ever since their stay at the festival, barely making
through her obligations. Caroline remembered asking her mother if everything was
alright. She had cryptically responded that even in face of the greatest uncertainty of her
life, she felt better than ever. Caroline had presumed that she was referring to the
elections and had laughed it off; the polls showed her with a double-digit lead over the
republican candidate.

The moment fogs of uncertainty cleared up in her horizon, almost half a century old still-
married Savannah leapt high in love leaving everything on the god’s ground. The

46
moment had come shortly after she saw Damru. She had received him at her house, eager
like a teenager. She kept staring at his face for a good minute or two, at the threshold and
was suddenly awakened by his childlike chuckle:

“You in love with I madam?”

In her diary she wrote:

“ that was the most unusual question I had ever been asked yet my response was
immediate and involuntary, my eyes dropped low and I blushed. He had been asked by a
shock jock in San Francisco about an affair with me and hence he had wanted to clarify.
But I believe that if I hadn’t been staring in his eyes at the door, he would have never
asked it – its not very often that spontaneity works this way… statistically improbable,
hence I will take it as a sign.

He knows about me, even a little bit about rotten Johnny. Wants me to say it out loud to
the world that I love him. Says that I have to be brave like his grandmother; I already
dance like her.

“You taak like I dadi; you dance like her, you better… if you brave like her … I love
you”

I know that he knows I am brave. He had the most reassuring look when he put his
words. I can’t disappoint him; I can’t disappoint our love. This is it…”

The next day she called Caroline and broke the news to her first. Caroline didn’t get it but
believed in her mother and told her to go ahead with whatever she thought the best. Next,
the portly campaign manager got the shock of his lifetime. He couldn’t hold himself and
started yelling and screaming. Soon everybody was collected outside her office. She
asked the receptionist to put her on conference with three leading newspapers and once
set, calmly said,

“ I am very happy to state that I find myself in the most blissful state today. The person in
me doesn’t want to let go of this beautiful feeling I have. I choose the pursuit of eternal
love over the presidency of this great nation. Thank you very much. May god bless you.”

That same evening she left for Ghana with Damru leaving her world behind to whine and
cringe and cuss. They were alike in their determination and victory over ordinary; they
were very complimentary to each other as well. She added dreams to his ability to
translate them in music; he added innocence to her distorting vision of reality. AIDS
bonded them at the working level and love at every other. They were respected and left
alone. She had joined him in working on a similar hospital in his home country, India. It
was to hold discussions in that regard and to seek blessings from his only living blood
relation, his father that they left Ghana some three months later.

47
In their time together at Ghana, they had recorded a series of melancholy beat sequence
on which she danced with the enthusiasm of a little girl, his grandmother’s ghunghroos
on her legs. The beats were inspired by her reflections on the rhythm of life in the AIDS
hospital and the melancholy in the sequence was certainly not meant to be hopeless.
However, after their death the tunes were released as Dance of Death and reached
legendary ranks on the charts.

Even the reggae community didn’t spare her in her death. They saw it as another shock
from the Babylon. They reacted with the might of their free spirit. There were concerts
held throughout the world for a week after the news and many celebrated his death in the
sweet intoxication of cannabis. Within that first week after his life, over twenty elegies on
him were put to tune. None had completely known his complete story and he lived in the
legends these songs had established.

Nothing could really change their stature to the posterity. Not even Caroline ‘s hours long
interview on a major network. She had painstakingly spent months trying to understand
their end and their story had only convinced her of the futility of impressions and public
emotions. She stayed what they had branded her to be; he stayed what he had made
himself to be.

He was widely believed to be the wizard of beats. He had the uncanny ability to translate
visual stimulations to musical ones to produce the same emotional effect. His music was
known to give people impressions that ranged from that of staring at an art piece in a
gallery, to as vivid as facing a massacre. He was truly magnificent. If he could see
something or imagine it, he could code it into beats. He said that he saw beats. His life
was a constant rhythm; he felt it in his every step, every move, and every word. He said
that there was no moment that he wasn’t consciously aware of a pattern. He was a
continuous music production system in every sense of the term. He plucked beats from
the space, from the buildings, from police batons, crying tears, wind, rain, fire and
everything else one could imagine. To him imagination was the limit; he wasn’t the
imaginative kind. Simple and stuck to the basic realities of life, he avoided flights of
fancy; he was a son of the soil. Even in the reggae community where the common
tendency was to stick to utopian ideas of the world, he popularized realism. He unified
reggae with other finer perceptions such as paintings, nature, machines and such.

He had over twenty platinum albums and had topped more charts than any artist in the
history. He was known for experimentation with the mundane. For the most part of his
musical career he had collaborated with his mentor and friend Baba Gari to produce some
groundbreaking sounds that found place in operas and nightclubs alike. Their music was
brave but hardly controversial and that seems to be the reason of their popularity. He had
been awarded prizes and honors by a broad spectrum of nations and organizations in the
world: he was presented with the Commandeur in the Order of Arts and Letters award
from France, state medal of honor from Mangolia, Order of merit in Jamaica, Sangeet
Natak Academy felicitation in India, the prestigious Nan Pa award in South Korea, the
Swedish Polar music Award, to name a few. He was a very common name in any popular

48
music award shows, grammy and all. Even though he never completed the high school he
had honorary doctoral awards from multiple universities from all around.

Baba Gari, a Trenchtown, Jamaica musician, who had wandered in India in search of
softer highs and spiritual growth, spotted his extraordinary talent and brought him to the
world of Jamaica music. Garibaldi Russell, an unknown songwriter and producer from
the ghettos of the TrenchTown in the slump days of Reggae, had been deeply dejected at
the loss of his fortune in failure of his second album to launch. He decided to seek a
different identity and inspired by the lyrically spiritual traditions of the Indians in
Jamaica he set out to India in search of the growth of his soul. A stoner by his religion, he
had also hoped to explore the ganja tradition of the country credited with bringing the
herb to the world.

His trip had taken him through the entire length and breadth of the country where, owing
to his dredded looks and a hard to say name, one group of mendicants that he had camped
with for a while christened him Baba Gari. He had liked the name and accepted it with
pleasure.

His meeting with Damru had been predestined, he had believed. After having lived and
explored the country for over three years as a guitar-strumming mendicant, he had
crossed the border to Nepal to experience the philosophy of the distinct Himalayan valley
region, which was touted to be one of the leading ganja producing places in the world.
Having experienced the mysticism of the Shiva temples in the western Nepal, he moved
eastward to learn about the Aghori traditions, the bizarre worship of Shiva in which the
adherents embrace the corpse rather than avoiding it – even feed on it. He had heard
about it in the Shiva temples everywhere but didn’t find one such group in any. To his
disappointment he didn’t find any Aghoris whatsoever in the eastern Nepal either. Some
mystic advised him to go search in the old city of Varanasi, which was believed to be
resting on Shiva’s trident and was an important center of shiva worship in the country.
Baba Gari’s visa to India had expired but he decided to take a chance through the porous
border to quench his curiosity.

He could never reach Varanasi but stumbled upon the treasure of his life. He crossed the
border with a caravan of ganja smugglers. He had befriended one of the young smugglers
at a roadside toddy shop near the Narayani River at the border. The plan was that his new
friend would give him a ride to the nearest railway station, some 60 kilometers from the
river on the other side. The group drove about ten kilometers west from the point he had
joined them and tried to cross the river at a point where the post-monsoon drying river
was shallow enough. Just at the same time, a certain incompetent engineer on duty at a
small dam, just kilometers upstream, released one of the five valves of the reservoir.

The entire gang of about twenty carriers and their security were wiped off along with
their stash and Baba Gari in the gushing water. Heaven knows what happened to others
but Baba opened his eyes washes ashore, around the evening the next day. Thick hair
locks had cushioned his head and the guitar on his back had glided over the rocks in the
river, saving his back. He was minimally bruised but extremely tired and hungry. To his

49
extreme happiness he was able to move and walk. He had to walk about a couple of
kilometers on the dry sandy riverbed before he could see houses and lights in the
distance. The mildly golden glow of sand took his mind back to the beaches back his
home and he felt homesick for the first time since he had left it. The homesickness also
brought an intense craving for ganja, which he imagined would be just the panacea for
the pain in his limbs and exhaustion.

He waded through acres of sugarcane fields that were being harvested and paddy fields
that were being sown. He considered the sugarcane fields a sign of providence and broke
himself one off. Before he had taken the first bite into the cane, a rather short and stocky
man, presumably guarding his crop, ran shouting towards him. Baba explained his
situation in bits of Hindi that he had acquired over his travel and seemed convincing
enough for the man to show him the road to the village and not take his sugarcane back.
Baba felt well fed off the meter long sugarcane and asked a boy if he could procure ganja,
the first thing as he entered a small village of about twenty huts that ranged from small
ones to hold a couple to rather big ones that could have kept a family. He later found out
that the small ones held a family and the big ones a couple of them. They were all
thatched with straw at the roof and the walls varied from straw to mud and brick. There
were some open sheds that had an odd cow or buffalo but there was an abundance of
chicken and goats. The cacophony of a bustling evening in a small village somewhere in
the gangetic plains of the Indo-Nepal border felt comforting to the slightly delirious Baba
Gari even though he was greeted by a band of stray dogs barking at him. He didn’t have
to worry about hunger but the cold and the intense craving still needed to be attended to.
The little boy didn’t really know where to get any but took him to a little gathering of
elders around what deemed like a really smoky bonfire. A group of men, dressed in
traditional lungi with a shirt or a tank top, sat around the fire on little supports made of
rice straw. Seeing Damru, them all shouted ‘Ram Ram Baba’ in greeting and after
offering him a seat amongst them went on to ask his well being as if he had known them
forever. He was mistaken for a saadhu, the mendicant mystic, again, he thought.

He had run into a village of crooks and con men where the first band he had stumbled
into was just trying to gauge his value. The village was a unique settlement of Ojhas and
Daayans where the Ojhas and Daayans of yesteryears had taken to crooked ways to offset
the reducing need for their old ways in the society. Traditionally, Ojhas have been the
healers of the community. They were essentially male and had an acute awareness of
spirits: both good and bad. They could act as vehicles for the spirits to continue or ward
an evil one off a suffering; in rare cases they cast spells as well. Casting spells was more
of a Daayan’s characteristic. Daayans were female counterparts of the Ojhas in a sense.
They were local witches who practiced witchcraft. Whereas Ojhas were the more
matured men of wisdom and understanding, Daayans were typically frivolous and petty.
Most often they went together in the clan so that the balance was maintained. A Daayan
without an Ojha’s blessing was not tolerated in the society and was often lynched or
made to eat human faeces, to un-witch them. In the days gone by, this particular clan,
even though belonging to a lower caste, enjoyed unprecedented patronage from the local
landlords. They used to go in and out of the landlords’ and that had set them apart from
rest of their kind. They had taken to the ways of the upper castes including opium,

50
English alcohol and even clothing, much earlier than the rest. With time, the Zamindari
vanished and so did the patrons of arts, absurd and esoteric. The Ojhas and Daayans
started resorting to ways unapproved by the society and, hence, were ostracized to live a
little distance from others. The village was called ‘chuhaarmaati’, the soil of crooks, and
held the disrepute of robbing any guests that passed through. There weren’t many visiting
this hamlet about a kilometer off the denser population but whenever a lost traveler, a
running smuggler or even a government official entered it, they came out with a loss of
their possessions. These crooks were infamous for selling an entire pontoon bridge on the
river, in parts.

Dusheheri Devi, grand mother of Damru Gosain, the village matriarch, an accomplished
Daayan, a far accomplished musician and a very uptight individual, was walking back
from the evening call of the nature to her hut when she noticed an outsider looking guy
being conned by these scoundrels in her clan at the village corner. She rushed and
snatched the chillum off Baba Gari’s hands as he was in the process of hitting the second
drag off the pipe full of laced ganja. She began with her tirade and soon everybody
around him vanished sheepishly. She dragged the sleepy Baba to her hut, one of the few
brick-walled ones in the community.

Damru was in his mid-teen years when he met Baba Gari. He lived with his grandmother
and knew little of the world outside. He had already dropped out of school but could read
and write haltingly and was able to do simple arithmetic as well. He led a finely crafted
life with utmost discipline under the tutelage of his grandmother. Dushehri devi was an
extraordinary lady destined in a sub-ordinary clan. A woman with very rigid standards of
right and wrong, she believed in complete conformance with the right side of issues. A
very gifted Daayan and a thinker beyond her society, she was well respected by all in the
community. Having been wed in the family of the chief, she assumed the role of the
matriarch of the entire clan of the descendents of the revered Sokha Gosain. Sokha
Gosain, the legend said, was credited with curing the spell on the king of Nepal centuries
ago who had granted him acreage of land in the Himalayan foothills that rivaled the
landlords of the time. The old man was a worshipper of Bhairav and believed in scarcity
of possessions. Thus, he distributed his reward amongst the upper-caste folks in lieu of
their patronage and respect to him. Some clans that became landlords from his land still
worshipped him as their family-god. Over the years his clan had grown and had even
deviated from their ancestor’s belief against possession, but they stayed together as their
own community. The chief of the clan inherited through the common law of descendance
to the eldest son. Back in the days, the chief used to be the ideological and physical
representative of the community. He presided over arbitrations of the village panchayat,
led negotiations and dealing with the landlords, provided consultations on agricultural
matters and looked after the entire community in a benevolent and just way. The situation
had changed in last couple of generations when her husband and her son had failed to
take the responsibility and had given in to the vices of opium, alcohol and cheap tricks.

She came to this village, in the Tirhut region of the state of Bihar, as the wife of a
wayward son whose dying father, Algu Gosain, had begged her father, a fellow

51
gandhiwaadi and Ojha, for Dushehri devi’s hand for his son, without dowry. She was a
beautiful teenaged girl perfected by her mother, a daayan of hard resolve and strong
character. Widower Algu Gosain had hoped that she would be able to bring his
motherless son, Prahlad Gosain, on track and brighten his house with the much-needed
feminine presence.

Prahlad Gosain had, much to the chagrin of his father, taken to the easy way in his life.
As an adolescent, he had taken to the wrong side of the stimulants that Ojhas often used
to help them focus and concentrate on their invocations. It soon became clear that Prahlad
Gosain didn’t really like the late night rituals in the cremation grounds as much as the
opium that he found a reason to indulge in. He didn’t remember a chant or a single
procedure. He instead formed a gang of kids his age and started stealing to feed their
habits. They hung out in a little mango orchard and wasted their time over the card game
of ‘Twenty-nine’ or the game of marbles, for money of course. It was Prahlad Gosain and
his gang’s disruptive behavior that had the entire clan ostracized and moved away from
their original homestead.

Crookedness and Prahlad Gosain formed such a formidable couple. He learned the finer
tricks of thievery from his uncle and practiced hard in perfecting them. He was supple as
a vine and could get through the smallest holes. He could make animal sounds, walk
without making sound, hold his breath for minutes and lie without giving a clue; he was
the master thief. By the time he was an adult he already had some rather courageous feat
to his credit. There were stories of how he had once jumped a fifteen feet high fence in a
single step. He had given the entire clan a new direction by graduating to professional
heists and had inspired a whole range of youth to make crime their family business. He
was the first to ever attempt his hands on the lockers in the local co-operative bank. He
failed thrice in opening the simple lock but his spirit didn’t fail. He spent a couple of
years perfecting the lock-smithy and went back the fourth time to open an empty vault.
Fairly incensed, they say, he took a dump in it and wiped his ass on the manager’s chair.
He was seen jumping out by the night watchman and the issue had brought a lot of
disrepute to his family and sowed the seeds of eventual exodus of the Gosain clan from
their original village of Sampur.

He did take the mantle of the chief of the clan, only that it wasn’t in the austerity of the
traditional profession albeit thuggery. He was everything that his ancestral chiefs had not
been. The chiefs had been, as tradition, devoted to lifelong discipline in diet, speech and
action; not him. His actions were nowhere near comparable and he had the foulest mouth
in the entire district. He was also known for his taste for English liquor and Chilli
Chicken, which he had the local toddy-seller cook for him every evening. The shoddy
toddy-dealer raped the drinker’s best company every single evening but none at his shop
were connoisseur or sober enough to realize it. In the drunken stupor, Prahlad often
recanted his crooked tales and almost always mentioned that the first catch of his life was
a chicken that his uncle had made chilli Chicken out of. From stealing Chicken and eggs
under the hen, he had definitely come a long distance in going for motorcycles and other
machinery that he stole and snatched in the later days of his life.

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When she came with him after marriage she was barely fifteen years old but quite mature
for her age – both physically and mentally. His old man, Algu, was suffering from acute
bronchitis and for some unknown reason didn’t expect to live long enough, hence,
contrary to the custom, his daughter in law was sent to her husband’s just a week after the
wedding. It was a household in chaos and utter disarray. There were four rooms in the
relatively big straw hut and a backyard that served as kitchen. The old man had asked his
sister-in-law and nieces to clean up the place a bit to make it presentable to the new bride
but even though respectful to the chief’s wishes, they found it tough to bring any
semblance of order in that junkyard of a house. Two rooms were full of Prahlad’s junk
that included a variety of radios, watches, cycles, tires, drums, boxes, tools and likes.
One of the rooms stored the vegetables the family grew, a table, chair and other random
furniture, a little arrangement in the corner for gods and goddesses along with many rats
and moles. The dying old man rested in the fourth room, which seemed little better than
the rest. He voluntarily relinquished it to the newlyweds and asked his niece to mop the
earthen floor and coat it with the cow dung; he moved his bed to be near the gods in the
other room. Prahlad always slept in the cowshed outside during the winter and on a well
nearby during the summer. They had a pair of oxen, a calf and an aged cow. When his
mother was alive, they used to have many goats as well but they had vanished in the thin
air when there was no one to keep track of them. They also owned about four acres of
land on which they grew paddy, sugarcane and vegetables. They had three earthen silos
for storing surplus grain in the verandah. The old man took pride in the fact that he was
leaving the silos full behind him; the fact was that Prahlad emptied the silos out not long
after they were filled in. With Algu getting increasingly older almost everything was in
complete disarray.

She came on a bullock-cart one summer evening, completely unaware, with myriad
tender desires and aspirations as adolescents typically have. Her parents had gifted her
three boxfuls of clothes, silver jewellery and sundry articles. She also had her dholak that
she had played since childhood. Her mother had also hidden her ‘guni pitaara’, the small
box that contained certain Prahlad’s aunts and cousins were not particularly warm in
reception and indulged only in name but she didn’t care; she had faith in the love of her
husband. Some of the faith came crashing down the very first night when she was
literally raped by him; the rest fell not long after. Having cried at the pain between her
legs and the broken heart, she resolved to tame the beast and tried all the tricks she had
been told about by his cousin’s wives and a married sister but there was no separating the
alloyed metal. She believed in her mother’s teaching that husband is a woman’s biggest
reward and her biggest liability as well. She naively dreamed of her completion in his
happiness. To set his mood better, she filled their room with marigold and roses, lit
incense sticks, dimmed the lantern and hummed a soft melody at the sound of his
drunken footsteps. Prahlad Gosain had no taste for such finesse in living. He kicked the
door open, tore his shirt off, scratched his crotch, maybe dropped a fart too and jumped
on the humming bird of his desire; and was gone to the company of cow and oxen to
smoke his opium and cough the whole night long. There was no warming up, no sweet
murmurs in her ear, no kisses on her neck, no effort or trying. Every single night it was
the same – wham bam, there goes the man.

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As a custom the brides didn’t cook till after the initiation ceremony, which typically
happened after the first-born had started walking. Dushehri devi had to initiate herself by
the end of the first month of her marital life. She had grown sick of the food Prahlad’s
aunt and cousins brought them – stale roti and watered down yogurt with salt and a little
chili for breakfast; thick mushy red rice with lentils that ran ahead of the rice and a
vegetable if the old aunt happened to be in a better mood, for lunch; and burned rotis with
water spiked with milk, often without sugar, for dinner – day after day. Even though a kid
herself, she followed her mother’s teaching and took charge of the situation. For the first
time after Prahlad’s mother’s death, food was cooked in the house – lentil paranthas,
kheer, dum aaloo, parwal fritters. Brides didn’t venture out of the threshold till they had
borne at least a couple of kids but Dushehri devi took the bold step to arrange for food
from the little money she had brought from her parent’s. The old man Algu cried tears of
joy and the wayward son never showed up. Algu’s sickness had worsened in the absence
of a healthy diet and she could tell by the food that Prahlad’s aunt sent them that there
was no love in the food either; a connoisseur of fine food in his days, this was the
harshest reality he had to confront in his old age. Another of his tortures was smoking the
hookah with an increasing adulteration of khaini, tobacco, in the ganja. His niece fixed it
up every morning and evening and she had taken over the addiction herself. Dushehri had
been quite fond of the weed as well and had had enough of the smoke that she secretly
dragged from her father-in-law’s hookah. She took control of the hookah and the old man
inhaled the smoke of pure well ground ganja once again. He felt the mellow high after
months. Overwhelmed with the intensity of his emotion as well as the intoxication, he
brought out his life’s savings hidden in a pit under the Pooja table, where his son dared
not venture, and poured it in front of Dushehri. Dushehri had never seen that much
money in her life but the old man asked her to keep it to run the house. She stashed it
with her saris in her box.

Late in the night when Algu kicked into the room and jumped on the bed he hit an empty
spot. Dushehri devi was sleeping on the floor and as her husband reached out to her and
pulled her hair, she jumped up like a lioness in front of him. Before he could react, she
roared in her loudest voice,

“Take a step ahead and I will burn the entire place down”.

Saying thus she closed her fist, mumbled a chant into it and threw her hand open towards
a strategically placed bucket of water. The water caught flames and Prahlad Gosain
almost peed in his lungi. Algu had come running to the door at her roar and he witnessed
the magic as well. Prahlad was furious when he gained composure after the initial
moments of shock and claimed haltingly that he wasn’t to be scared of such tactics.
Dushehri devi quietly cleared that she didn’t want to scare nobody, that her powers that
she had gained under her mother’s tutelage would come back to hit her if she ever used
them for anybody’s wrong. She just wanted them to be a family. This gave old Algu
some strength and he added his own complaints against the state of affairs.

He ended with “you have to be responsible and human. You are not a kid anymore”.

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By this time it was clear to Prahlad that he was trapped. He snapped out of the room to
his place amongst the animals.

Algu had the usual tears in his eyes again. He held Dushehri’s hands and murmured his
blessings. He saw a perfect daayan in his daughter in law. He saw somebody who was
destined to a glorious path that her mother in law couldn’t tread upon. He was perhaps
the last real Ojha alive in the entire clan. There were a couple more but none other had
attained any siddhis. Such was the onslaught of time that even though a publicly known,
it was alright for an Ojha to be without powers. This acceptance signified more than
tolerance; it was acceptance of the end. Tamed by the clock. The trickling sand down the
hourglass is but a qualifier of the scheme that’s bringing it all to an end. He couldn’t help
getting philosophical at moments of such reflection.

Trembling with happiness, Algu asked her to accompany him for one dance to Bhairav in
the crematorium. They waited for next death in the village.

An old widow died a week later. Two things happened as a result – The old man got to do
his last dance invoking Bhairav, around the burning pyre, to his daughter-in-law’s beats,
in front of an audience of dogs, Lord Bhairav’s companion of choice. Earlier in the
evening Prahalad Gosain made a pass at a chamaar’s girl at the other end of the village,
when all men were burning the deceased widow. The extent of pass was not made clear
but rather early in the morning, the girl’s father knocked on the door. Contented and tired,
Algu had fallen like a log when they had come back in the wee hours. Dushehri had just
set in slumber that she was woken by the knock.

The chamar was very clear in his warning. He respected the Ojhas and Prahlad was the
chief’s son and, moreover, his daughter’s reputation was involved as well, so he was just
warning. He promised to slit Prahlad’s throat if his daughter was ever bothered again. In
a society like that the norms were not very linear. It was justified and well supported to
take the most extreme action against the minimal transgressions towards one’s honor.
And, honor essentially meant the ability to sail through life without having to encounter
rape, marital and familial rapes apart of course, or love in the family. Probably the
psychology was remnant of the Muslim rule and excesses in that society. There really
was a time when anybody who didn’t convert was raped or murdered. So, being able to
survive with one’s faith and life intact must have been an achievement in itself. Such
strong sentiments towards romantic love were perhaps more a result of cultural
progression, assimilation or assassination, as one sees it. Progenies were property and
putting them together with a worthy counterpart was an enterprise, a chance for parents to
exercise their wisdom, the extent of their reach. In such a situation any son or daughter
who progressed towards any involvement that could lead to their decision to marry each
other, were definitely not taken happily by their family. So, basically in such a complex
system, it wasn’t easy telling whether it was molestation or consensual fooling around by
two adults that got caught; it almost always ended up being the girl’s responsibility to
give it the direction she thought best. Prahalad fervently maintained that the girl liked
him and that the necking was her idea.

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‘ I have not hit that bottom yet’, he said.

She didn’t want to judge but made it very clear that the next time he strayed his penis
would be rendered useless. He believed her. Along with the threat she also gave him the
verbal permission to do whatever he pleased with his body since it was her fault too that
he husband wasn’t satisfied. She sighed a relief that the old man was asleep and didn’t
have to face the angry Chamar.

‘ Poor babuji would have died at this’

Wonder if Algu died in shock of what he overheard in the morning or in celebration of

his final dance; he was peaceful in his death. She realized that he was no more when she
went with a glass of milk to wake him up later in the day.

Prahalad was a happy man in his father’s death. Feeling snubbed at home, he had been
increasingly anxious to wear the role of the chief and even though everybody knew that
he was no Ojha, they respected the tradition. He was anointed the chief by rubbing the
ashes of his dead father on his forehead by one of the pseudo-Ojhas. He felt the warmth
of the ash in his head and surprisingly he suddenly felt responsible for the first time in his
life that particular moment.

Once at home, his bride advised him to relinquish because he didn’t deserve it. He felt
hurt at her accusations that he didn’t have the least bit of discipline, fortitude, vision,
power or support to be able to carry the duties of the position. To her surprise, he
declared that he’d prove her wrong.

He started with discipline in his indulgences. Stopped hanging out with lads, quit playing
cards and refrained from kleptomaniac desires. He unsuccessfully tried to quit bidi,
khaini, opium and alcohol for a day and then decided to just moderate himself a bit. He
started with following every rite and ritual of mourning customary to his society. Shaved
his head and moustache, didn’t eat salty food, didn’t have sex and didn’t leave the
village. He seemed to be doing well till the day of ‘Shraddh’, the final ritual for the dead
on the thirteenth day after death. In a statement-making act, he didn’t invite anybody
from the Chamaar community; he topped that with confrontational statements to the
revered Pundits who had complained about the feeble and old cow he was donating as
part of offering for his much respected father’s well being in the afterlife. He called them
cheats and fornicators who dared find flaw in his beloved cow, whose milk he had grown
on. Youth of his clan had shouted in unison behind him,

“Yeah! Cheats and fornicators”. All of them were accomplished crooks.

Prahlad smiled crookedly to Dushehri and she didn’t like it a bit but respecting her bridal
status, kept her mouth shut in the public. She kept herself busy attending to her father
who had come and stayed with them to help out with the rigors of the ceremony. She was

56
able to convince him to ask Prahlad to let her go with him. He promised that he’d arrange
for the ‘donga’, the second coming, soon.

Just before leaving she noticed that her father in law’s life savings were missing from her
box; Prahlad had spent part of it in his father’s last rites. Not sure enough to blame
Prahlad and afraid of the reprisal, she kept mum.

In the absence of his father and wife, he felt free; and it didn’t take long for Prahlad to
resort to his older ways. He felt rich as well. Aware of his status, he tried to bring as
much pomp in his affairs as he could think of. He stopped visiting the toddy-shop and
instead arranged for the guy to bring him his alcohol and chilli chicken home. He started
eating opium in paan instead of smoking it. He started entertaining hooligans of his clan
in his cowshed in the portion where his father’s favorite cow, now donated to the
reluctant pundits, lived. He had partitioned the shed to form a sort of outhouse where he
had thrown an old cot where the hooligans sat and talked shit the whole day. He tried his
best to project the image of a chief he had in his mind, even seriously tried to his old
habit of stealing but couldn’t help conning people here and there. In the dark nights, he
posed as a hawaldar, in his khaki sweater and father’s stick that he wielded like a baton,
and harassed petty opium smugglers that passed through a dirt road, north of his village,
that ran from Nepal to Motihari, a city thirty kilometers south east. He got some
thrashings a couple of times in the process but, in general, it helped him feed his habit
and got some easy cash as well.

Occasionally he felt responsible as well. He felt responsible for himself; to prove himself
a man in his wife’s eyes; old father was dead anyways. He felt responsibility towards the
title he held; he craved to use it. He tried his best to arbitrate the best justice possible in
cases that he presided upon. In the process he often ended up antagonizing many of the
Panch, the five jurors. He had a fistfight with one from his caste, but a different clan, who
objected to his decision of slaughtering a goat that had grazed into the plaintiff’s newly
sown paddy field. He proposed that two kilo of the meat be given to the plaintiff as
compensation and the defendant was free to sell the rest. The defendant, a chamar,
respected the chief Ojha and performed as per his wish even though the panchayat hadn’t
really delivered any judgment due to the chaos. The rest 8 kilo of meat was bought by the
toddy dealer at a wholesale rate, who delivered a couple of skewers to Prahlad everyday
for the next week.

In about a month’s time, he received a missive from his father-in-law breaking him the
news of his wife’s pregnancy. He felt like a man and pumped by the pride crossed over
the fear of his wife’s threat of rendering his organ useless in case of infidelity. But he
figured that Daayans are not really clairvoyants and there’s hardly a way for her to know,
if he acted with caution, in the comfort of her father’s home. To avoid suspicion, he
started fornicating with a middle-aged lady of his own caste; the younger ones whether
chamaar or his own kind, were far too dangerous. Moreover the middle-aged lady’s
husband had abandoned her a decade ago and she was a walking dynamite of desires. She
felt compelled to experience secret explosions hidden in straw piles or inside the

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sugarcane fields. He hooked the lady’s young daughter with one of the teenagers in his
clan, to train him in ways of the flesh. The daughter hooked a bunch of his friends with
some of her friends in the Chamaar community. Pretty soon a whole lot of the Ojha clan
were fornicating with a whole lot of girls in the village. The matter went out of the hand
when one of the unscrupulous young one was caught in the act. The chamaar girl spilled
the beans about everybody. The entire village was enraged at the manhood of the Ojhas.

“How dare them scoundrels be doing all of our girls?” everybody asked.

The chamaars decided to boycott the Ojhas and anybody that associated with them.
Others of their caste, outside their clan, decided to follow the suit and the few Brahmins
in one corner of the village demanded action against them.

Prahlad Gosain rose to the occasion. He had been desperately looking for an occasion to
act grand; now that he was to be a father, he felt the need to act big all the more. He
proposed migration to a place away from these low lives around them. He talked how the
world had changed and they had lost respect in the eyes of these ungrateful scumbags,
who had seemed have forgotten how the Ojhas had saved their lives countless times. He
lamented how the insolent chamaars had stopped according the Ojhas the respect they
deserved and how the Brahmins acted increasingly condescending. He declared that he
would take charge of the rehabilitation. He offered his plot of two acres a couple of
kilometers south, near the river, in exchange for the land their current houses were on;
and promised to arrange for needed material from his own pocket for their twenty odd
houses that needed relocation. It was his day and a majority of fellow clansmen agreed
with his idea. Some older ones did display displeasure but were quickly snubbed by their
sons and grandsons who seemed to in charge those days.

On his father-in-law’s invitation that came with a dhoti dyed yellow and five rupees, as
was the custom, he graced his in-laws during the festival of Dussehra.

The festival of dussehra holds special importance for those who practiced occult and likes
in that part of the world. It involves worshipping the holy goddess in her different
manifestations - Shailaputri, Brahmacharini, Chandraghanta, Kushmaanda, Skandamata,
Katyayani, Kaalratri, Maha Gauri and Siddhidatri every day for nine days before the
tenth day of final celebration of the victory of good over evil. Each of these
manifestations represents the goddess in different emotions or temperament, thus setting
a framework for the personality of daayans especially. Shailputri, the daughter of rock, is
the embodiment of strength; Brahmacharini is the symbol of devout austerity and the
bliss of impending moksha, enlightenment; Chandraghanta is an apostle of bravery;
Kushmaanda has a magnanimous presence; Skandamata is the goddess of fire; katyani is
alluring in her golden form; Riding an ass, dark kaalratri dissipates darkness and bestows
freedom from fear and adversity, thus, holding a special importance for the daayans along
with siddhidatri, the bestower of siddhis, the accomplishments; and Mahagauri with three
eyes is like an eight year old girl, intelligent and peaceful though. These nine days were a

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time of intense control and dedication for every daayan, wannabe or otherwise. They
fasted and abstained from every indulgence of the physical being.

Every night the daayans gathered together at a place and invoked the prescribed
manifestation of the goddess onto themselves. They chanted, danced, played with fire,
sacrificed pigeons and goats, practiced spells and hoped to achieve a siddhi or two by the
ninth night on which they went to the cremation ground and danced naked to invoke the
siddhidatri. Young dushehri was pushing her strength in going through the rites even
during her pregnancy. Many in the society had been of the view that she was impure till
the birth of her child and hence shouldn’t have participated but her mother approved the
participation; her mother was respected as the wise one. So, on the ninth night, fatigued
and starving, dushehri started hallucinating at the cremation ground. Her dance turned
erratic and her steps started striking the ground in jitters; he entire body shook and he
eyes seemed as if they’d bulge out. The entire congregation of witches was taken aback at
the sight and started prostrating to the devi possessing the hungry dushehri. Dushehri
stood on one of the prostrating daayans and thumped her back. The poor daayan started
crying and sought forgiveness for adultery; a second confessed stealing; another one
promised to sacrifice herself if she broke the fast next year. Dushehri wasn’t patient
enough to extract a report of the evil in them from all. She abruptly stopped after the third
and asked for tasmayee, the rice pudding cooked with jaggery. The goddess was fed and
soon after that she passed out.

It was a setback for Prahlad Gosain. He had waited for nine days to live the moment
when he’d have broke his news of control and decision making to his wife who was still
oblivious of the relocation undergoing back in Sampur. She felt shy facing her husband in
front of her parents, especially being pregnant. She kept herself aloof and acted busy with
the devi’s worship. He had controlled the intense desire to spill his bravado to his father-
in-law and brother-in-laws; and had relived the moment more than hundred times in his
head. He had rehearsed it time and again how he’d broken the news to his wife; and had
settled on the cool nonchalance of a chief who did what he had to do. All of it got washed
in the news of his wife’s attainment of real daayan-hood that spread like a wildfire in the
entire village. She had far surpassed her husband. He felt lame in breaking the news from
his village in such a situation, and refrained.

Her son was the biggest disappointment of her life and she could never forgive herself for
that. The frail boy was born premature and went on to mature into the village idiot of
‘Chuharmaati’. He was born at her parents’ and didn’t set foot in his village till he was
over a year old. Despite her parents’ disproval, she had brought her son to their home.

Prahlad Gosain had been an angry man at his wife’s attainment. He hadn’t taken the
failure of his plans to break the news of his first act of chief like significance lightly. He
came back a man of resolve and hadn’t set foot in her direction ever since. When her
brother came to visit him with the news of his son’s worth, Dussehri found out about the
exodus from Sampur. She banged her head at the news but what could she do. Prahlad

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had been further incensed by his brother in law’s comment on the stupidity of the idea of
moving away from the civilization to the middle of nowhere.

He hadn’t bothered them and they hadn’t bothered him till Dussehri got aware of the
rumors spreading in their village. Her childhood mate told her how stories that her
husband was planning to remarry or has already done so were rife. Ladies as well as
gents, in villages like those, took gossiping as a pleasant pastime; and were rather
progressive in their dissemination of the stories. She heard from her brother, a few weeks
later, how the current version said that Prahlad had refused to accept her child as his own.
She didn’t believe the rumors because she was confident of her curse. She believed that
Prahlad would never stray, but this realization made her think how miserable must it have
been for the young man to live without the fulfillment of his physical desires. She
softened at the thought and through a chain of more fantastic thoughts, and perhaps her
aroused libido as well, she decided to go back to her husband by herself. She conjured
images of tender loving from a love-starved young man again.

She told her family that she was going back to claim what was hers. She packed her
bags, took her kid, bid farewell to her family and rode the bullock cart to ‘Chuharmaati’
ignoring her father’s incessant disproval. Her mother had shown displeasure initially but
kept quiet once the daughter’s resolve became apparent.

The new village of Chuhaarmaati looked nothing like the kind of places she had known.
It looked like a lonely blotch in the middle of the ripe paddy fields all around it. She tried
to console herself with the relatively cleaner spread. Most of the huts from the old
settlement had been relocated by moving the straw sheets that made the walls; the
damaged ones were remade with stolen bamboo and straw. Some of Prahlad’s close
confidantes were rewarded with the mud that was dug out around the settlement –
Prahlad’s idea of securing the village from wild animals like jackals and hynas. They had
used the mud to plaster their straw walls to give it extra strength and resistance against
nature. She didn’t have problem finding Prahlad’s house because it was the only that had
brick walls. He hadn’t moved their hut. He had built a new house with brick walls
instead. The bricks had been stolen off multiple kilns in the radius of twenty kilometers
and the mismatched sizes were glued over each other by the yellow soil that he had
surreptitiously stolen from a house under construction in another village few kilometers
away. The entire scheme gave the poorly laid out walls a rather crooked look. The
construction had taken the shape of its constructors’ psychology. None of the three rooms
had a regular shape; all were crooked. So were the straw roof and the oddly spaced beams
that supported it.

Prahlad was taking his afternoon nap when she knocked at the door. He was stoned and
didn’t get it at first. She bowed down to touch his feet and said in her sweetest voice,

“Wouldn’t you hold your baby now?”

Prahlad’s first reaction was to step back but at the same moment a gecko snapped a fly on
the behind them and the infant in his mother’s lap chuckled at the observation; just that

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one chuckle from his on and even Prahlad Gosain melted. He picked the baby in his arms
and she bolted the door from inside.

She was disappointed when Prahlad didn’t respond to her overtures that afternoon. He
kept playing with the baby while she changed clothes in front of him. She bent in front of
him to give him a peak into her blouse but he didn’t even look up; he was lost in his son.
So fond of his son was he that it made his wife jealous. One of the purest joys in the
world is the joy of fatherhood. Prahlad realized it in his son’s every giggle and smile.
Very soon, his son became his biggest indulgence.

His wife never gained from the newly sprouted feeling of love in Prahlad. He was scared
enough of her powers to treat her bad or completely defy her but maintained his pursuit
of one-upping her at any given chance, rather unsuccessfully though. His behavior in the
bed didn’t change either; it stayed ‘Wham-bam on the unsatisfied ma’am’. However, to
be near the infant as much as possible, he started sleeping in the same bed with them. He
took charge of thrusting her nipple in the crying infant’s mouth in the nights. He also
stopped his extra-marital pursuits after the very first day of her homecoming, when
exasperated by his lack excitement for her body she had directly questioned if he had
been getting something on the side. He was taken unaware and denying it was one of the
most difficult lies of his life; he lived in the constant fear of losing his penis for a couple
of months.

Prahlad named his son Sardool Gosain but as an infant, he couldn’t say more than Dool
gosain whenever his name was asked. So the world took to calling him dool gosain. Dool
was a thin child with a perpetual drool and a snot spewing nose. Much to his mother’s
chagrin, he had taken to his father’s ways from the very beginning. He preferred to run
around naked and roll in the soil; and had the most irregular bowel movements. He was
pumped opiates in his blood at a rather early stage when his father would give him a lick
of opium to stop crying. The kid loved the feeling and would drift into a peaceful sleep
even in the hottest sun. This ritual bonded him further to his father. Came a point when
the drooling dool became his father’s shadow. He found comfort in his father’s ways and
a rough ride in his mother’s; he obviously chose the former. His mother forced him to
read, write, count, listen to her sing, play dholak, clean up, wear clothes, not say bad
words, eat on time, shit on time and every other thing that he hated with the same passion
that she tried to impose them on him. In his father he had a smooth glide through life.
Sitting on Prahlad’s shoulder Dool felt like the king of the world – peed when he felt like,
pulled his father’s hair, fingered the nose, smeared his snot all over Prahlad’s face and
cried aloud when nothing else seemed better; Prahlad gave him a little lick then and he
drifted to the heights of sweet intoxication.

Addictions were the only thing Dool could contract from Prahlad; he was too stupid to be
crooked. He walked with a slight hunch and talked with unease; and spat all over the
person he talked to. His mother had been able to teach him some basics like writing his
name and such but he never progressed beyond. He was too afraid of the school and

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much preferred watching his father over. In spite of all, he did serve a purpose in
mellowing Prahlad to some extent.

Father and son lived in their own world and Dushehri devi didn’t bother them much, once
it became clear to her that the duo was beyond her reach. She liked to sing, play dholak,
practice her chants, and grow vegetables and flowers. These kept her busy and she lived
her life away from the pettiness around her. She had long resigned to her husband’s ways
in the bed and over time grew rather impervious to it. He came every night, jumped on
her and humped his strokes and slumped over to the side when done. Over the years, her
genitals had gone numb to the friction of his member and came a time when she wouldn’t
even wakeup to Prahlad’s grinding. She just ate a lot of pomegranate and stuffed cotton
soaked in brine inside her every night, for contraception. She had been advised so by her
mother who was strictly for family planning.

The contraception failed once, many years after dool’s birth. She rushed to her mother
when she didn’t menstruate for a week after her due date. The period of menstruation
held special importance for daayans as they performed special rituals to cleanse
themselves during those days, hence, she kept a very close tab at hers; and freaked out
when it didn’t happen. It was unimaginable for her to bear another kid. An idiot that dool
had turned out to be, she had lost all of her maternal instincts.

Her mother bowed to her adamancy and fed her cotton root bark and baby pineapples for
a miscarriage. The miscarriage happened but it came with severe bleeding and acute
abdominal cramps. The unwanted embryo took its revenge in making her situation
critical. She was hospitalized and when modern medicine didn’t seem to be working, her
mother, stricken with the guilty-feeling, danced to the Bhagwati and wished an exchange
of lives. She was willing to let go of her arthritis-ridden body for the good of her
daughter’s. It worked. The day the mother fell to the bed, her daughter walked again. The
mother felt a bit unhappy about the prospect of leaving it all and the daughter was really
happy at the news that she would never conceive again.

The mother spent an entire month talking to her kids; she had a lot of wisdom left in her
to impart before she left. Wisdom apart, whereas she gave her son material and money,
she gave her daughter her spells and secrets and the music as well. The son received her
life savings, the daughter got the key to the neighboring shop factory’s warehouse and
identification symbol on the Sodium that they had used to produce fire in the water. She
had told the curious daughter that a sage passing through their village, pleased by her
hospitality, had produced the key for her. The reality was different. She had once strayed
with the amazingly charming night watchman of the soap factory. He had given her the
key to the warehouse, where they met in the dark of the night to fornicate. It was him
who had showed her the magic of Sodium to impress her; she was shrewd enough to use
it to impress the world around her. She also gave Dushehri her ‘Pashan-mridang’, a near-
elliptical sandstone, size of a classic mridang, a double ended barrel drum instrument
most commonly used as accompaniment in chanting. She had received it from her guru
and the word was that one who made a mridang out of that stone would be the greatest
drummer ever. She also gave Dushehri her little statuette of Bhairav. The black deformed

62
piece of sculpture had supposedly been passed through inheritance in the chain of
daayans, which, she lamented, would be broken soon because her daughter didn’t have a
daughter. She asked Dushehri to pass it on to an able person nonetheless. She repeated
her lectures on the art and craft of witch hood and repeatedly talked of the essence of
being a daayan,

“It isn’t about being supernatural. It about purifying yourself to an extent that the devi
channels through you”

She instilled the importance of passing one’s wisdom on as well and asked Dushehri to
get herself a disciple.

She also re-emphasized her oft-repeated conjugal advice,

“ Men are a bundle of energy and that energy needs to be exhausted for them to be in
control. A man goes restless when he tries to store the energy in him. So, make your man
work and give him sex because every drop of man’s semen is produced by 32 drops of
his blood and one drop ejaculated is tantamount to 32 blood-drops of energy exercised.”

The old lady had it all figured out and she tried to impress her best upon her progenies.
She also advised both her kids to smoke ganja to tame the restlessness as well as aches in
the aging body. She warned them against opium, tobacco and alcohol.

Before leaving, she summoned her son-in-law and grandson. She was not pleased with
the duo. The onslaught of spit from about eight years old dool turned her dying self
totally off and while saving herself from the assault, she asphyxiated herself dead inside
the quilt, which was coincidentally full of her sick body’s gaseous emissions.

Prahlad and Dool were sad that they couldn’t get anything from the dying lady and that
sort of helped them blend with the grieving village. Dushehri’s father chose to give them
both a cow each in her mother’s memory when they took leave after the shraddh
ceremony. Dool insisted on riding his cow back and they left riding their cows in front of
an empty bullock-cart, just in case if they got tired of riding the cow. Dushehri chose to
stay few months with her father to smoothen his adjustment without his wife.

As Dool grew up, Prahlad started sleeping with him in the cowshed but after two cows
came in the shed, they came back to sleeping with her. It was also easier for him. Over
the years, he had stopped hiding his indulgences from Dushehri and it was just easier for
him to slump over after he was done with his release rather than get up and walk out to
the cowshed. Dushehri was either asleep or feigned sleep every time he came to her and
was hence forced to ignore the smell of alcohol in his breath or his constant spits in the
spittoon that came from the opiated Betel leaves, Paan, that he so fancied after sex.

They always presumed that Dool was asleep; Dool wasn’t always. For the longest time he
just didn’t get it but came a time when he expressed his desire to emulate his father on his

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mother. That led to his first foray into the wonderful world of ejaculatory happy feeling.
The cool father taught the thirteen year old how to masturbate instead. Made him rub his
member back and forth till he ejaculated. Young Dool was a happy man after that. Soon
he became infamous for getting into the act of his pleasure at any given chance. The first
time his mother noticed it, she was aghast and slapped him but later realized that it was
better to instill the sense of privacy instead. Dool’s stupid brain just couldn’t get why it
was prohibited in the public. It took another threat of rendering another penis useless that
got his father into taming his inopportune desires by giving him a hit of opium every time
the boy got a boner. The mother developed a deep dislike for the male sex organ in the
entire process. She was so grossed out that she started resorting to visions of Bhairav
riding his dog while her husband was riding her.

She started hating her nights and when it became unbearable, she took resort in practicing
her spells and rites. Her discomfort in the bed proved to be a motivation enough for her to
embrace the full-time profession of a witch. She started practicing chanting and
invocation with a few wannabes who worshipped her as their Guru. They congregated at
one of the four cremation grounds in their vicinity and honed their skills. She believed in
a slightly different approach to witchcraft than was prevalent in that village of crooks.
This art had been tainted as well by the change in psychology that had seen gentlemen
Ojhas turned to cheats and thieves. It had gone more and more esoteric and vile. The
ultimate goal had shifted from the transformation of oneself to be a medium for the
goddess to transforming the spells so that they cast the desired harm. The process of
gaining siddhis required a personal sacrifice as per the tradition; the daayans of those
days had gone so corrupt that they interpreted this requirement as sacrifice of a close
relative; and often resorted to the extremes of sacrificing their newborns and such. She
made them all sacrifice something really personal; the easiest she pointed out was sexual
desires. Unwittingly, she created a band of frustrated husbands and that further aided the
crookedness of the clan.

One Gosain was busted in the nostril of a docile cow in the middle of the night. Another
was caught getting his balls licked by a goat. They talked of a third one having
relationship with his granddaughter. All the perversion around her strengthened her
resolve in her purity and discipline. She created a world for herself in which there was
little space for desires or the disappointment of no fulfillment.

She was further driven to her passions. She rolled the ‘Pashan-Mridang’ in its leather
shell every night to their congregation ground and played on it to provide beats for the
invocation dances or chanting. The practicing witches were told that a real dholak would
have produced too much noise in the night; deep inside she wished to become the greatest
drummer in the world. She perfectly choreographed the dance moves and mandated
absence of clothing for all participants in winter as well as summer. The nights after a
cremation were especially important. Kaal-Bhairav was invoked on those nights by a
feast of kheer cooked on the burning pyre and dancing around it.

She also used her influence to promote her other ideas of right and wrong. They kept the
village fairly clean and green. Her fondness for flowers had the hamlet look like the

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colorful womb of a green firmament, as a wanderer had remarked one spring before he
was drugged and robbed of his possessions by the men of Chuharmaati. From a blotch on
the beautiful space it had transformed into a beautiful booby trap on a bland space. The
ladies were so engrossed in being righteous that they skipped over the increasing clasp of
wrong around them. Whenever there were acts of depravity these ladies tightened
themselves further- fasted more and promised to be more and more righteous. Kids
dropped out of the school on their fathers’ prodding and incessant ridicule from other
kids from other villages; the aspiring witches were busy trying to stay equipoised. They
preferred practicing containment in light of decrease in their husbands’ income. Some of
it could have been a result of the ganja that all of them had started using regularly but
that’s beside the point. The point is that Dushehri devi’s sense of good created a dipole in
the clan where the commendable existed together with the wretched; both feeding off
each other.

Prahlad Gosain had maintained his status as the chief of the clan. His position had been
buttressed by the demise of few remaining old-fashioned Ojhas in the recent days. The
acts of bigger heists from far away places didn’t remain a hush-hush affair anymore. The
clansmen now met and collectively discussed and decided on properties to steal as well as
consumption and disbursement of the items. They had started taking contracts as well. It
had started with a pundit from a near-by settlement soliciting their help to steal a
transformer off another village. It had gone on to successful accomplishment of many
projects – from secret acts of vandalism in houses of the loathed ones to destruction of
crops and trees. They were cheap, readily available and well known in the region. These
guys were good con men as well. Collecting taxes for the canal water from unsuspecting
farmers in remote villages became their favorite act of conning. A group of them would
don khaki shirts and cycle together to some particularly interior village and pose as
government officials. A few of the poor ones paid them taxes every year for years.

They had also started ambushing smugglers in a group and if it were not for Dushehri
devi’s sodium tricked they’d all have been hacked to death by one particularly pissed
group. They had looted opium off few petty carriers and coincidently all of the carriers
worked for the same big fish. The big fish thought of teaching the goons a lesson and sent
a gang of armed men to the village. Dushehri devi had just stepped out of the house and
was going to the nearby field with a group of ladies for their evening toilet that they
noticed the armed men riding their motorcycles towards the village. Something didn’t
seem right to dushehri devi and she rushed back into her house. By the time she came out
the bikers were near the trenches around the village. She didn’t think a moment and
shouted the bikers to halt else she would burn everything. As the bikers slowed down, she
mumbled into her hand and threw it in the direction of the trench to the right. The trench
was filled with rainwater and it caught fire. Then she mumbled and threw to the left of
the road in their village; the trench on the left caught fire. Men on their motorcycles were
scared out of their wits in the glow of sodium burning in the water and a band of witches
standing beyond the curtain of fire. They retreated back faster than they had approached.

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The men of the clan lied that the attack was in response to their destroying the opium of a
smuggler. The women naively believed that they were finally reforming their men; while
the men tripped on the loot.

The nights in Chuharmaati were really eerie and quiet. With the men on their missions
and a majority of women on theirs, it was left to sleeping children and animals only for
the most part. Dool developed a very interesting hobby in such a situation. He rarely
accompanied the men to their work because he preferred to sleep and had a tendency to
lose his breath in light of fear, as well. One hot night he came out of his house to catch
some fresh air and was pleasantly surprised by the silence in the air. He ran around, peed
on the street, poked some sleeping cows and entered a random hut. Sensing no activity or
alert, he jumped into the bed and masturbated to his contentment. The joy was addictive
and by the time he was sixteen, he had soiled almost all of beds in his clan. He
remembered every single of it.

He was eventually caught by a lady who had been abstaining from the practices due to
menstrual cramps. She reported the matter to his mother who created a hell over it. She
made it clear in unequivocal terms that Prahlad better did something about the son or else
she was taking control of him. In a fit of suggestions to improve the situation she also
mentioned the therapy of wedding, a girl’s touch, a proper release for their idiot child.
Prahlad liked the idea and got working on it.

The tradition in that part of the world had been that girl’s parents approached prospective
groom’s to arrange the marriage, often through matchmakers; and any guys who couldn’t
attract attention stayed on their own forever. Prahlad had to take initiative in this case and
arrange a bride for his only son who attracted attention only for wrong reasons.

An intense search ensued and after months of extraordinary search, one of his trusted
lieutenants, Bhonu gosain proposed the candidacy of the second cousin on the mother’s
side of his cousin-in-law. The girl was beautiful but slightly challenged mentally and the
matter could be fixed if Prahlad were willing to spend some money on the wedding. The
girl’s father had unexpectedly died of heart attack and the mother wanted to dispose her
liability off at the quickest possible but didn’t have a penny to spend on it.

Prahlad took a short cut and got the girl to his village after paying her mother a couple of
grand rupees to hold a feast if she pleased. He found out that the girl was in good health
and even though she had tendency to hop while walking, she was docile. She spoke loud
and appeared shy when not in motion. He was rather pleased at the deal and
congratulated himself. He took the bride and the groom to the transferred site of their kul-
devta, the family god, and solemnized the wedding himself. He pronounced that he didn’t
need any pundits to interfere in his affairs; he felt really brave at his decision. He had no
idea how to conduct a wedding; he had been too stoned to notice a thing at all of the
weddings he had been to, including his own. So, under the eyes of the entire clan, he
improvised. He made the bride and the groom perform a series of antics and chant
multiple sounds that didn’t mean anything. He had them prostrate over each other in front

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of the fire; he had them stand on one leg for half an hour; he had them bang their head
into each other; and in the most hilarious of all, he tied her sari to his dhoti back to back
and made them take rounds around the fire. Poor groom’s dhoti came falling down on the
ground as bride’s sari pulled it off and he stood there, naked with his erect penis clearly
demanding attention. The horny teenaged groom had hardly been able to keep his hands
off, what he was told to be, his toy; and had taken every chance to poke, grab or nudge
her.

Dushehri was disheartened at the absurdity that had been played in the name of her son’s
wedding. She felt happy at not inviting her father or brother for this ridiculous occasion.
But, at the same time, she realized that there wasn’t much better possible in the current
situation and kept mum. She received the bride dressed in special clothes and broke a
coconut at the threshold while they entered the house. She cooked a feast for the entire
clan and served it with enthusiasm. She set the new couple’s room in the one on the left
corner and decorated the marital bed with flowers. She spiked his milk with a potion of
wild grass roots for virility and gave her pomegranate juice for contraception.

Dool started with extreme fondness for his bride and couldn’t have enough of her. For the
first few days he refused to come out of the room. The first time he had her to himself in
their room, he was all over her. He sucked on her face, breast, belly, fingers, and toes;
probed every inch of her – from hairs to her toenails with the expediency of a kid opening
a surprise present. He had difficulty opening her blouse or petticoat, so, he pushed his
fingers inside her cavities through the clothes. His father had taken quite sometime in
explaining her what to do to the lady but he hardly remembered any of it in the
excitement. He vaguely remembered something about sticking his dong in and he knew
that the entire process involved jumping on her. He took his lungi off and started jumping
on his wife who was petrified at his member slapping on her body. She reached out to
block it from hitting her thighs and touched it in the process. Dool ejaculated at the first
touch; he always gave in to the very first touch from her. He was somewhat disappointed
but it had felt good nonetheless. He continued with his probing and kept it going.

He made his mother give her new clothes from her box everyday; he had her cook
delicacies for every meal; sometimes he fed his bride himself; he walked her out to
urinate or defecate and insisted on standing guard next to her while she indulged in her
affair. He took special delight in bathing her and meticulously rubbed soap all over her
body. He marched up and down the village with her and walked like a winner. He forgot
opium completely for the time being.

Dushehri devi felt extremely happy to see her idiot son’s dedication to his idiot wife and
tried her best to promote it. She felt a weird resentment deep inside for her son’s display
of affection in ways her husband hadn’t done; she termed it ‘change of times’. She never
let these thoughts affect her actions the least bit. She religiously cooked and cleaned after
them. She had a better cover put around the hand pump in her backyard, where they
bathed, to make sure that the young couple’s activities were relatively private. Her
husband had found them a tad bit ridiculous but kept quiet in gratitude of the relief the

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antics had provided him. He no longer had to look after his son. He found the brain of a
ten years old safe with another of his kind. People talked about them and had many a
laugh at their expense but little did Dool care.

Dushehri didn’t want the couple to ever procreate for she was afraid that they might
produce another specimen like them; Prahlad couldn’t wait to have a grandson. When his
daughter in law didn’t show any signs of pregnancy for few months, he decided to have a
peak at them one evening. He was disappointed in his son at the idiot’s complete lack of
understanding of the reproductive system. All that drooling moron did was jump on his
fully dressed wife or groped and poked her; and she giggled. Then when he got tired of
jumping, he whipped his tool out and masturbated himself all over her - End of the game,
back to groping and probing.

Prahlad had another talk with his boy and explained in very detailed and rather explicit
terms what he needed to do in order to make a baby. He made the boy repeat after him
what was to be done to achieve maximum pleasure and children as well. The boy
repeated it the prescribed number of times and got it. But it didn’t prove too good for
him.

He could never stick his tool in. He invariably ejaculated at the first touch of her skin on
it every time for the whole of week or so that he tried. He could see that he was not able
to make babies and his bride kept giggling at him. That really frustrated the excessive
hormones in production and he turned violent. Beat himself more on the bed than the
girl’s body but it signified the end of love.

After more than six months of sobriety, Dool switched his addiction back to the drugs.
He didn’t want to hang around his father as well and preferred to roam by the river alone.
Even his childlike brain couldn’t take what it understood as loss of manhood. Within
days, from a doting lover he turned into an evil monster for his wife. Every time he saw
her he felt this extreme urge to hurt her and he gave in to the urge without a second
thought. He came home high beyond his senses every evening and started thrashing his
wife. She was fairly strong and he was fairly uncoordinated, hence, he was never able to
inflict any serious injury to her; but his violence freaked her out. It’d mostly happen when
nobody would be in the house because the man would be out making a living and the
lady out practicing her music and witchcraft; and so it went unnoticed by them.

The sense of self-protection is rather reflexive in nature and doesn’t discriminate between
intelligent and imbecile. She understood the pattern of violence and started hiding herself
in her mother-in-law’s room around the time Dool came back from his rambling. The
first day he tried to find her everywhere in the room and stuck himself under the bed in
the process. When she came back to the room, she found him sleeping under the bed with
his legs spread out. She freaked out and kept crying out loud till the ladies got back from
the ground and pulled her husband out from under the bed. She did the same the next day
as well and he couldn’t find her; same the third day, fourth day and so on; soon it became
a habit to her.

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One fateful night, Prahlad came home relatively early after an evening of excessive
drinking at the MLA’s. He kicked into his room and jumped upon the sleeping lady on
the bed. He was pleasantly surprised at the movement under him and the moans as well
as the wetness as he slipped in. He found reaction against his thrusts and felt the grind in
his loins. He who had resigned to the frigidity of his wife was happily surprised at this
change. Who he presumed to be his wife was equally happy to have something in her.
She let out few happy shrieks.

Perhaps they knew it the first time, perhaps they didn’t. What matters is that they
continued with it. She came lied down in her mother-in-law’s bed everyday till she came
back and whenever he reached home earlier than his wife they made love. The intelligent
as well as the idiot felt the pleasure and didn’t complaint. She liked to shriek at her
loudest while orgasm and it had a very characteristic tone to it that was somewhat like a
goat running away from the slaughterhouse – shrill nasal sounds with loss of breath
interspersed.

Initially whoever in the village heard it, thought that she was getting a good one from her
man but pretty soon her idiot husband was noticed outside his own house investigating
the shrieks. Then they heard heavy breathings and cusses in a man’s voice. Everybody
wondered,

“Whats going on?”

But none said a thing.

The gents told the ladies and soon the ladies heard them too but they didn’t say a thing
either. Dushehri devi found out about it from the tussled and wet sheets on her bed but
she had long stopped thinking about sex. Dool had finally seen his wife being taken on
trips of ecstasy, standing at the door of the room, but he didn’t know what to ask his
father. On their part, the old guy and the young bride never said a thing either. It was the
biggest secret known to all in the village. Many must have felt that it was wrong but none
was willing to give it a thought.

In time, Dool’s wife, Kumbhari devi, got pregnant.

Damru was born the night of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. He came out in the lone
darkness of his village amidst a world decorated in lamps and lights. Gthe worshippers of
occult didn’t believe in lightening up the darkness; and the crooks loved it for their own
reasons. There were firecrackers everywhere else but here in the village of chuharmaati
the wannabe daayans and ojhas danced their special dances; and the crooks initiated their
young ones in the art. The night of Diwali is auspicious and special for multiple reasons.
It’s the darkest night of fall and that makes it important for the worshippers of dark
forces; and at the sasme times gives others a reason to brighten it up. Then it’s the night
of Luxmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, who supposedly took a trip around the world and

69
paid visit to random homes. The hopeful hindus, thus, slept with their doors open this
night. This undoubtedly made it the best night for the novice thieves to practice their
skills. The oiled themselves up and stripped down to a tight underwear and a black mask;
and made their initial foray into a lifelong career through the open doors awaiting
Providence.

That same night, hours after his birth, his grandmother poisoned his grandfather, in the
social sense of the word, and his mother. Laddoos laced with cheap rat-poison stopped
the heartbeats in the philanderers because their existence created a very tricky twist of
relations for the baby, she had reasoned. The baby deserved to be shielded from the sins
of his parents. He deserved a fair chance in the world. He was her baby; he was her
second chance. She made him the person he became. He could never get away from his
grandmother.
He was born a beautiful baby. His grandmother had midwived his mother to deliver him
while the rest were busy with their chores on the busy festival night. For almost an hour
the newborn stayed in her hands before the fainted mother came back to her senses. In the
very first hour the baby formed such a bond with Dushehri Devi that she decided to go
for the termination. She had postponed the final decision till that very moment and once
decided she never regretted it. The mother and the grandfather, who had come home early
from a gambling party, as was customary in higher circles, celebrated the birth of a star in
the family with laddoos laced with cheap poison. Dool, the unaware father, came home
late in the night to the sight of his grandfather’s body slumped over his wife’s. He moved
their bodies around looking for the baby. The baby on the bed with the grandmother, in
the other room, lost his sleep on Dool’s vigorous shaking of the dead bodies and started
crying.

Whether it was the realization of his father and wife’s death or revulsion from the baby,
Dool turned around and ran out of the home for good. He didn’t see the boy till much
later when the big boy’s fans had hunted him down. Much on that in due time…

The boy was named after Shiva’s drum that produced the beats of destruction as well as it
captured the eternal rhythm of life. Gentle looking Damru wasn’t really destructive in any
sense, he did live the name by living in beats. One conversation with him and one knew
that he was a musician. He was well built and supple and always smiled. He was almost
shy and made his most aggressive points without raising his voice. Baba Gari was
impressed.

Dushehri devi had dragged Baba Gari right in time. The clansmen had maintained the
pace of change over the years and the clan had now graduated to bigger and scarier
crimes that included tussles with the police as well. The police had unearthed
decomposing bodies in the trench around the village and the old lady had been losing her
hopes for the village. She couldn’t have let them commit such a crime in front of her
eyes.

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Baba couldn’t have been more grateful. More than saving his life, by bringing him into
her household, she had given the lost mendicant a new life. The more he had seen of the
young boy’s and his grandmother’s life, the more he was amazed. The quietude of their
perfectly planned and coordinated life with colors of music implanted at its core was like
a living dream-sequence to the wandering soul. Baba’s body hadn’t taken well to the
inhalation of Datura smoke in the fatigued condition it was in and he was forced to spend
a couple of days with minimum activity. He lay in a clean room which had a big vault
kind of box in one corner and an old cupboard next to it that had a whole bunch of sundry
items like not working watches and clocks, not working radios and cassette recorders, old
broken tapes and records, rusted nuts and bolts, railway coupler heads and pins, various
other railway fixtures etc etc. He slept on a cot next to the wall, on the opposite side of
the crookedly rectangular room. The cot had a mosquito net set using two intercrossed
sticks that latched inside its pods, at each end. There was a couple of meters long bench
placed along the long wall between the cupboard and head of his cot. The room made the
entrance to the house and on the right of the entrance was another door to the rest of the
rooms and the backyard. He lay on the cot and listened to the sound of the activity in the
household.

He heard their day start with the crinkle of her bangles as she shook sleep off her body
and the crackle of his bones as he stretched himself out while it was still dark in the sky.
The sound of few other feminine steps converging together and a pair of nimble feet
speeding away, as few ladies from the neighborhood went in a group for the morning
relief and little Damru started his morning run, followed their footsteps after they stepped
out gently through Baba’s room. After few minutes of pin drop silence, Baba heard the
cock-a-doodle-doo of a rooster in the distance acknowledge by the cowbells just outside
in the same rhythm; and the dogs bark just the right discordance in the morning sound.
The morning rays hit the door to the approaching sound of the boy’s steps and then the
rising up of the cows and oxen; and the soft patting and massages on their bulk. The
cleaning of their huge feeding bowl; the hustle of straws and the chopping of the fodder;
the morning slurp of the animals mixed with the breathing of an exercising young body
pulling itself up a beam – Baba felt in a trance.

By the time the ladies got back from their morning trip to the fields, Damru was done
fixing the cattle and exercising; and was in the backward brushing his teeth. In the silence
of the morning Baba could hear the motion of the neem-branch, the datoon, on his teeth;
even that had a rhythm in synch with the rest. He pumped the hand pump to take a bath as
his grandmother quietly entered the house. He seemed to chant some mantra while
pouring water over his head from a bucket and the initial thud of the water in every pour
seemed to match the sound of ‘OM’; and perhaps his ears were ringing, he heard a
similar chanting in the mumbled voice of the grandmother as she had entered the house –
same ‘OM’ as well. The grandmother went out to milk the cows as he dried his body. The
sound of the jet of milk on the metal walls of the bucket, as she alternatively pulled one
of the two udders, juxtaposed with the slurping of a calf on the other udders in the most
unique way, but it still seemed to follow the same meter of life around.

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Damru entertained Baba with the music of grinding stones, as he ground the bhang leaves
in a paste. The grandmother showered in the same tune and fixed the shake after she was
done. They downed their glass together before the boy came to wake Baba up.

A soft-spoken boy whispered ‘Jai Bhairav’ and knocked on the door; and as Baba Gari
looked into the gentle eyes of the angel, he knew that there was something different out
there. He couldn’t help noticing the boy’s fingers as he was handed the glass of a milk
shake like drink. They were long and sturdy; rough with well-sculpted knuckles; and
callused all around. Baba’s Guitar, the back of its body damaged, lay on the floor and it
caught the boy’s fancy. Baba Gari had never heard somebody produce such a sound on
the first guitar he had laid his hands on. Damru picked the guitar and as Baba’ eyes
signaled him to go ahead, he slapped the same tune that had been pervasive all around
since the morning, on the frets to the amazement of the dred-head. He giggled at his
dexterity and asked Baba how it was played.

Perhaps, Damru took Baba’s pause as hesitation and rushed out of the room, to come
back with a ‘Lota’ (a small round vessel to drink water from, or, as in this case, to carry it
to the fields for morning ablutions) and a slick neem Datoon. Baba had been aware of the
procedure for toilet activities in the countryside in this part of the world, so, even though
he understood only bits of what the boy spoke, he clearly got the direction he had to hit
the fields in.

The boy and the grandmother sat down for their morning pooja, which involved a series
of chanting in front of the statuettes and pictures of the local gods. Both had an
impeccable voice and the Dholak they played mesmerized him. In the quiet
contemplation while he was relieving himself in the fields, Baba was inspired to make
music. He had hit a mental block and the years of wandering, even though refreshing for
his soul, had done little to invigorate the musician in him. Jah had finally washed him
ashore to the destination of his wandering. The bhang he had consumed in the milk shake
cleansed his bowels like never before and provided him such a clarity that he felt a series
of epiphanies.

They were still chanting when he got back. In fact, he had been able to hear their chants
in the fields as well and walking back he felt himself in the same rhythm as well.

She offered him a piece of banana and yogurt from offerings to the god that morning and
asked his whereabouts, after he had washed his hands and face at the hand pump in the
backyard. The verbal language was a bit of a problem because even though they could get
a lot of what he was trying to say in his broken Hindi, he had to rely on the non-verbal
clues to understand the particular dialect of Hindi that they spoke. He was surprised at the
ease of communication despite such impediment; over last three years of wandering, he
had gotten used to such complications anyways.

She was pleased to realize that the stranger came from a land where they spoke English.
She had been wishing to expose her grandson to the English language and ways for a
while; she saw a perfect chance in this Jamaican. He had been able to communicate of his

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intended journey to Vranasi to see the aghoris. At which, she told him that she herself
intended a visit to the holy lanes of that city in about two month’s time; and if he wished,
they could go together; he could hang out at her house till then. He smoked some fine
ganja in lady’s hookah and acquiesced to her idea. He was already smitten by the life
there.

He remarked that they must be accomplished musicians. They blushed at it and waived
the compliment aside. They were not really accomplished. As a matter of fact, there
wasn’t much in that place to accomplish for them. Their music was a way of life rather
than a quest for some benchmarks. Performance was an unknown concept to them. The
closest they came to performing was playing and singing religious hymns at some
religious functions like Ramlilas and Ashtayaams in the neighboring villages; but the
audience in such functions hardly focused on the musical abilities as the religious rituals
and stories took the attention.

He expressed his desire to learn and make music together and she expressed hers of
teaching the apple of her eyes some English. They folded their hands in namaste to show
agreement. Damru nodded at the threshold when his grandmother attached him to the
stranger, for the rest of the stranger’s life, as it turned out to be.

After he recovered from his fatigue, Baba shadowed the young Damru from his morning
run to the evening walks by the river. Baba wasn’t permitted to the nightly practices,
which happened every alternate night, but other than that he gained a near complete
experiential indulgence in the symphony of their existence. The kid was a wonder. Old
grandmother had sculpted him in the best image she could have imagined and he had
followed her grooming with utmost fidelity. In the generally quiet Damru’s presence
Baba became a child himself; he felt his humble-most watching the child make music in
stone splashes on the water and axe strokes on woods. Even his words sounded like songs
to Baba’s alien ears. He had become a fan the first day when he had heard him practice
on the ‘Pashan-Mridang’.

He had landed in the village at the time between Dusshera and Diwali. The two festivals
covered the last month of fall, before the onset of the winter. Dushehra was the
culmination of nine days of worship to the Goddess at the beginning of the month; and
Diwali signified the end of the month and was dedicated to the worship of the goddess of
wealth as well as the dark forces, for those who practiced occult.

That particular time of the year saw an increase in cases of evil spells cast on people by
naïve practitioners who had just embarked on the path to acquiring Siddhis; and it thus
ripened the demand for Ojhas, the exorcists. There were hardly any left in the
neighboring villages and in the absence of any able men in the traditional clan of Ojhas,
Dushehri Devi had taken the mantle on herself. In days of the past the society would have
disproved of such feminine transgression into what was essentially a man’s sphere, but in
the days recent the coiety didn’t have a choice. Damru had been under training and even
though he was competent enough for a majority of cases, his grandmother ddn’t like to

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send him alone on calls. Sometimes, however, it became necessary. Baba was lucky to
have such an emergency arise during his presence.

Thakur Ranjit Singh was from the family of ex-landlords and represented the
constituency in the state legislative assembly. He had old associations with Damru’s clan.
He had employed the crooks many a times for dirty practices during elections. He had
always had a soft corner for Prahlad’s family and had helped them with sale of their sugar
cane to the local sugar factory at random occasions. On one particular evening, when
Dushehri devi was leaving to attend a particularly serious spell on a Pundit’s wife,
Thakur Ranjit Singh’s men came running, seeking her help to cure his young daughter
who seemed to be under a spell too. Dushehri Devi didn’t have a choice but to send
Damru for exorcism at the Thakur’s house. Hurriedly, she repeated a bunch of
instructions and blessed him before walking off to the Pundits.

Baba accompanied Damru to the Thakur’s in the Jeep that Thakur’s men had come in.
The procedure wasn’t nearly as pompous as Baba had been imagining. The girl, hardly
ten years old, was sitting in a corner with her arms wrapped around her folded knees and
head sunk into it. Damru went closer and gently touched her on her elbow. She jumped
up with an amazing ferocity – her eyes were blood shot; she was breathing heavily and
incessantly mumbled something that didn’t seem intelligible. Thakur and one of his men
grabbed her arms as she struggled to get herself free, occasionally shrieking like a bear
being maimed. Her mother, standing behind a curtain at the threshold had tears in her
eyes and covered them with her sari as they pinned her daughter on the floor. Damru had
begun his chant and in between the chants, he asked for fire, dried red chili, garlic cloves,
five flowers, water, milk and if possible a bidi. He stooped to the left of the pinned-down
girl and started chanting into her ear, aloud. As he increased the intensity of his chants,
the girl yelled louder. He kept on till the fire had arrived and by that time it had arrived
the entire village was reverberating with the girl’s shrieks. It was breathtaking for Baba to
see the young man in action; he worked as if he had been choreographed for the situation.
He threw some dried chili in the fire that stank the entire room with its strong pungent
odor and the girl started breathing really heavy. To make it worse, Damru offered her the
lit bidi, which, to everybody’s surprise, she started puffing at it like crazy. He pulled the
bidi from her hands and handed her a chili from the fire plate; she gobbled it up.
Continuously chanting, he next put a clove of garlic in her hands and she chewed at it.
Miraculously to Baba’s eyes, by then she had started breathing much better and had
stopped mumbling; the growl in her eyes remained. He took the five yellow marigolds
one by one, warmed them over the fire and touched her eyes with them before throwing
them in the fire. This reduced the redness in her eyes. Then he offered her some milk in a
bowl and she drifted to sleep before she could finish it. Damru touched her vein and
patted her back while assuring the relieved parents that the girl was out of danger. They
made the two wait for a couple of hours, just to be sure.

The Thakur took interest in Baba Gari who had introduced himself as Garibaldi, a
musician on sabbatical. They talked about Jamaica and Baba found out that the vast
population of Indians in the Caribbean was but the descendents of indentured laborers for
Sugarcane plantation from that part of India only. Ranjit singh also knew about the

74
Chutney music, which is but a mix of Jamaican and Bhojpuri, which happened to the
unknown dialect he had been hearing around him. Ranjit Singh was aware of Damru’s
prodigious talent and he chuckled with suggestion that maybe the two – Baba Gari and
Damru – should make some chutney music during Baba’s stay. They were fed dinner and
bid adieu with some cash reward that Damru politely refused to accept.

From the moment they had set out with thakur’s men till the time they reached Damru’s
house, Baba didn’t notice the slightest change in his poise - Curt, precise, always in
rhythm and always in control.

Baba was able to fix his guitar by replacing its back with a thin plywood board Damru
had been able to arrange for him. They made a little music together as well. Baba had
especially liked capturing the sound produced as Damru had slashed canes off the
sugarcane field and the Sugarcane song they made that evening went on be a chart buster
not too long later.

Baba Gari was so occupied in assimilating this amazing experience that he couldn’t really
teach much to Damru. Damru was sharp and did capture quite a bit by himself. He sang
the sugarcane song to his grandmother and the old lady had never been pleased more. She
repeatedly asked Baba Gari to have the song played in the radio. Little did the old lady
know, his sound, soon, ruled the airwaves. Hardly aware of the English annunciations
and pronunciations, he was able to capture the words by their sound and could
manipulate them to such a melodious lyrics that could have never sounded as good in a
native tongue. The way he said ‘sugarcane, sugarcane’, made Baba believe that this song
was up for something big. It went like this –

Sugarcane, Sugarcane,
Tell dem stories
Of immigrant’s pain
Tell dem atrocities
Of the Babylon system
Dem bring us broders
From far away lands
Enslave us in papers
N dem documents
Kill our spirits
For dem petty gains

Sugarcane, sugarcane,
Tell dem stories
Of immigrant’s pain

Dem sons of bhairav

Dem Sons of jah
Dem free spirit rasta
Dem spirit taming ojha

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Dem Indians
Dem Afrikaans
Dem fate stricken people
Dem still were humans

Sugarcane, Sugarcane,
.
.
.

Keep dem shackled

Keep dem inna dungeon
Suck dem energy
Suck dem outta zion
Fill dem pockets
With sweat of dem poor man
Couldn’t kill dem living force
Dem hearts of the lion

Sugarcane, Sugarcane…

This was the song that proved to be Damru’s ticket to the world, to boundless fame,
stardom, which was unimaginable, and everything else that happened to him outside the
soil of ‘Chuhaarmaati’.

In her death Daadi, as Damru called her, released him to everything else. Ever since his
birth, she lived for him and there was no breath in her that wasn’t somehow linked to the
kid’s welfare and well-being. Ever since birth, he was hers. She had been meticulous in
her execution and it had paid off in the diamond of a man that had been produced as a
result. She shielded the kid from the world by engaging him in wholesome activities that
exercised his mind as well as his body. He never had a friend before Baba Gari, no
parents, no significant teachers (he did go to the school for a couple of years but his
grandmother had preferred to teach him basic reading writing and arithmetic herself
only); but he had his dadi who amply filled every shoe he needed around him. They lived
in complete synchronization with each other in complete union at the deepest level. To
him there was nothing taboo for his grandmother. Ever since he was a little kid, she had
danced naked in front of him at the cremation grounds, when he banged his baby fingers
on the ‘Pashan-Mridang’ to give beats to her dances. She had explained him everything
about the sexual intercourse and the importance of the activity. She had repeated her
mother’s words in telling how a man who didn’t indulge in more meaningful activities
wanted sex all the times. According to her, if done properly, it was something couples
should indulge only a couple to three times in their entire life, depending on the number
of kids they desired. Imparting the best of her wisdom by setting examples, she had made
the gem she couldn’t bear in her womb. She had long forgotten her idiot son, Dool
Gosain; she did tell young Damru that his father was mentally challenged and for some
reason unhappy with them. He had always wanted to meet him. Damru stayed unaware of

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his parentage all his life and Grandmother had wished it just that way. She died the
strategic death with a feeling of relief and contentment.

It was the diwali night. Baba Gari had bonded rather well with Damru and had quite
impressed the grandmother; and was, hence, invited to the cremation ground to witness
the dance to invoke kaal-bhairav, the ruler of eternity, and the one who governed the
time. Only Ojhas and daayans attended the dance, which used to be a naked affair, back
in the days. But, for past few years a lot of perverts from other villages had been attracted
to the ritual to feast their eyes. Thus, she had mandated a single cloth over the body for
attendants as well as dancers. Baba removed his pants and underwear and was compliant
with the rule.

The dancers draped a white sari around their body and danced with a grace that belittled
the ballet dancers. Dushehri devi herself played a dholak and Damru was on ‘Pashan-
Mridang’. Years of practice on the stone had made his fingers hard like rock and they
produced a very distinct and sharp sound when they snapped on the sandstone, which
looked completely like a mridang by now. Baba had marveled the idea of practicing on a
stone mridang since the very first time he saw damru play it. Even in his wildest
imagination, he couldn’t have thought that the product was a work of generations of
musical tradition that had finally produced the world’s greatest. He asked her the question
that was her mother’s dream playing in her head for years.

“Where did you buy that stone mridang at?”

The lady blushed with joy and giggled his question off. Damru had never seen his
grandmother giggle before. He found her dead the morning after Diwali. Her palm had
her mother’s Bhairav in the open palm, as if she was offering it to him. He took the
Bhairav and kept it on his person till the other diwali night when he left himself. He cried
at the first realization but handled it well after reasoning it out in his head. He prayed to
Bhairav and closed her smiling eyes.

Their first single, ‘Sugarcane, Sugarcane’, simultaneously topped the R & B and Reggae
charts within a couple of months of its release; a single was released to test the waters in
the market. Jamaica received the song with enthusiasm and the radio stations played an
edited version endlessly. The original song was over 15 minutes long and had Damru’s
alaap and solo on the mridang. The reggae community had never seen a fusion like that.

Typical musicians who experimented with fusion of different styles of music, quite often
limited themselves to juxtaposition of instruments of different kind, or traditional scales
of one kind on instruments from the other, and so on. Baba Gari and Damru’s music was
touted as the fusion of tempo and rhythm. The public couldn’t have enough of their first
song and it broke records of requests on the radio. There was a huge demand for an
album and they brought out their first one in less than four months to change the fortune
of many in the business.

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He had recorded the first song in their very first week in Kingston but their producer,
Carl, held the release for a month, to avoid clash with other major releases. Carl had
immediately noticed the same potential in the kid that Baba had been incessantly raving
about. Damru was a pro from the let go. The first time he sat behind a drum set, he was
rolling beats and capturing meters by a single exposure to songs. For his first month in
Jamaica all he did was jam with Baba the whole day and checkout the city in the night.
He loved playing the instrument and was a master drummer in just the first month. He
devised his own sounds using his rock hard fingers and alternated between sticks and
them with amazing dexterity. All his life he had lived and breathed beats. There wasn’t a
single waking moment when he wasn’t consciously aware of the rhythm in or around
him. A drum set with the advantage of diversity of sound, as compared to tabla or
mridang, had easily captured his fancy.

His arrival in the reggae capital of the world was rather smooth. They had been able to
impress Thakur Ranjit Singh enough with the Sugarcane song to get his support in
shifting the kid. Thakur was a well-connected rich man. He was able to get Damru a
passport and helped arrange his Visa as well. Baba had to record their song on a tape
using a tape recorder at Thakur’s place and send it to his one-time accomplish and a
rather no-name music producer from the famous ghettos of trenchtown in Kingston,
Jamaica. Carl, the producer had agreed to send them a letter offering Damru a recording
deal, which had facilitated his visa. Thakur had even paid for the ticket and had even held
a small news conference before their departure; Baba Gari was touted as an eminent
reggae star and Damru’s contract with Carl was seen as a direct route to stardom.

His ‘Pashan-Mridang’, along with his grandmother’s Dholak, Bhole-swami, the statuette
of Bhairav and some odd clothes were his only possessions when he had landed in
Kingston with Baba Gari; he kept the first three with him his entire life.

Kingston, with a population of three-quarters of a million is the capital and the largest
city in Jamaica. It lies on the southeastern coast of the island and is one of the leading
ports of the West Indies, Its well known for its sugar, rum, molasses, bananas and reggae.
Around the middle of the twentieth century, the west Kingston ghetto enclave of
trenchtown became the birthplace of reggae music, which was essentially a fusion of ska
and Afro beats to the American R&B that the trenchtown musicians listened to on the
radio. The music was embraced by the small population of Rastafarians, the followers of
the Ras Tafar, the prince creator, king Halle Selassie of Ethiopia; some said that the
music embraced the Rastafarians; both made sense. It soon became the voice of the
struggling masses that saw it as a medium to express their anguish, pep their spirits up
and find a ticket to wealth and fortune as well. The groovy upbeat rhythm picked rather
fast and quite well in the rest of the world; and the lyrics of desolation and the absurd
hope in fables connected with every soul that had ever struggled. The ghettos had
produced a number of prominent reggae figures, including the legendary Bob Marley,
and that made the neighborhood, even though abject as ever, a mecca for the struggling
reggae artists.

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It was in this mecca of groove that Damru landed with Baba Gari in a tiny one-bedroom
accommodation, one winter evening. The tropical climate of the Jamaican coast made it a
popular tourist destination in the winter season and the city of Kingston was bustling with
people. Damru had never imagined a bustle that strong and was scared at first. Carl had
come to receive them in his old rickety car and the drive to their place of stay from the
airport seemed like a dream to Damru. Baba had assured him that there were a lot of
people like him, other Indians, but he couldn’t see a single on the streets they passed
through. He was also surprised to see not many people with dreadlocks, as he had
imagined everybody in Baba’s land. Baba had taught him the basic English alphabets so
the signs, even though unintelligible, didn’t seem completely alien. But, the language was
the killer. Baba had always talked to him in his slowest pace possible but not a word was
legible here.

Sensing his shock, Baba had taken Damru to an Indian restaurant in downtown Kingston
the next morning and to their surprise, they had found that the owner could communicate
with Damru in broken bhojpuri. This helped bring Damru to ease and once he had the
drum set in Carl’s rickety studio, he didn’t need any other acquaintance.

For the first month, besides recording their first song, all they did was jam in the old
studio the whole day and tour around the city in the evenings. Damru would have much
rather continued their sessions in the nights as well but the escaping sounds from Carl’s
studio were still loud enough to cause nuisance for the neighbors. Carl operated the
studio illegally and didn’t want any trouble. Baba tried to keep the kid busy in other ways
so that he didn’t feel homesick and it worked. Moreover, for the first time in their
relationship Baba felt as if he had something to talk about to the kid; and he made best
use of the opportunity. They covered the entire Kingston in their evening trips on the
public buses, the first month. Baba took him to the old busy markets in the downtown,
walked on the renovated parade, showed him the bob marley museum in the uptown new
Kingston, hung out at the harbor, wished to buy a house next to the hope garden and paid
homage to the houses of every single star that had come out of the city. He laced their
visits with elaborate explanations and cultural insights. A keen observer, Damru felt a
familiarity with the city very soon. He was able to pick the tongue quite a bit as well.

Damru had already learned about Baba’s religion, Rastafarianism, and found a lot of
similarity with his practices; Baba had been careful to present it thus. Having been a
lifelong vegetarian, he adapted to the I-tal diet without a problem; Ganja he had been
already exposed to. The down to earth Rastas made him feel quite comfortable in their
company and he never had a reason to complain. He created a convenient life for himself
by assimilating whatever came easy and whatever he deemed necessary. He even
dreadlocked his hair, which, baba had explained, was a rastafarian’s way to be natural
and, hence, closer to the divine; Damru had known of shamans in his world do the same,
so, it made sense. He never took to Jah though. To him it was his Bhairav till the end.
Very well aware of it, Baba had been very careful in matching the mention of Jah with
that of Bhairav in their songs. In his later years, he started donning a thick robe in
Jamaican colors. It wasn’t well known if he supported the political stands of the Rastas

79
but he did develop a soft corner for Africa. He also continued using the Jamaican Lion
Flag during his shows, even after Baba was gone.

Carl had been kind enough to give them some advance, which he reaped out a lot from
later, and that paid for their survival initially but Carl, himself struggling with poverty,
could only afford so much. They had to rush their first album. Baba tried to assemble a
couple of his old mates and hurriedly recorded their first album ‘Unity of Cultures’ under
the band name ‘The Drifters’. The album came out far below Baba Gari’s expectations
but he lived with it considering the urgency of their financial situation. It had an
instrumental tune called ‘Bhairav’s Descent’ that was Damru’s dedication to his
grandmother. He played the invocation beats with the accompaniment of a flute and bass.

This tune picked favor amongst the critics but didn’t really bring any significant revenue
as those involved had planned. Even though their successful single had fuel a good
demand for their album, they couldn’t manage the timing well. Their album came out in
the busy spring season along with at least four other chart-topping artists. They were too
broke to pamper the radio show hosts and a vast majority of Jamaicans could afford only
one new tape every season. The fortune changed when Baba sent a copy of the album to
Thakur Ranjit Singh who had it reviewed in a prominent newspaper. There was a story
involved and hence it picked in the media. Soon the public in India started flocking the
stores to experience the wonder of the wonder boy from Bihar. Baba had somehow
foreseen it but Carl was pleasantly surprised at the sales in that faraway land which he
knew nothing about. They sold their rights to an Indian record maker for an exorbitant
sum and never looked back.

Locally, the album boomed after a resting period following the average initial sales. That
was a result of Baba’s well-executed strategy as well. They had kept Damru a mystery
boy to the public and rest of the reggae fraternity. No offers of interview or live shows
were accepted till the critics were raving about the wonder kid who, a yet known, Baba
Gari had discovered in the plains of India.

The band was launched to public eyes at the world famous Reggae Sunsplash in Montego
Bay almost five months after the release of the album. What happened at the festival was
a phenomenon. Placed to perform in the early afternoon of day two of the four day
festival, they created such a following that the organizers had to give them a slot on the
concluding night to pacify the public who just couldn’t have had enough of his genius.
Damru sat hidden behind a mesh of snare drums, toms, cymbals and a big bass drum that
had their characteristic lion imprint. He had a set of conga drums on one side and his
grandmother’s dholak ‘Bhole-Swami’and the much beloved ‘Pashan-Mridang’ on the
other. He had an assortment of percussion tools from the conventional cowbells, jam
bells and blast blocks to a set of random scrap that he had found on the streets of
Kingston. It was a delight to see the guy juggle through all these instruments. He moved
from one to another, from his fingers to the stick to a wire brush with the agility of a
dancer. He performed without a tinge of hesitation or nervousness and established a
rapport with the audience in the very first tune they played. They played the extended

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version of their famous Sugarcane Song and the way Damru produced the sound of
sugarcane being slashed left one and all in the show mesmerized. Even Baba had not
known his true colors till he started responding to the voices from across the stage. At the
concluding night, he and Baba Gari set a feat of sort in following the crowd’s uproar.
Hardly ever before in the history had the masses guided the stars on the stage in such a
way; they loved it. Anybody who experienced their performance stayed in the perpetual
hangover of it for the rest of their lives, in quite literal terms.

It was the birth of a star. The press couldn’t have enough of the new revolution in the
reggae history. They called him the Jimi Hendrix of Drums and yearned to know more
about him. He was reclusive. His understanding of the language was very limited and he
demonstrated discomfort in interviews. Baba had initially tried to hold press sessions but
sensing his discomfort in the very first, they abandoned the idea. After the success of
their show at the Sunsplash festival and the ensuing fame, Baba withdrew the kid from
Carl’s contract and instead offered Carl the role of an assistant, which Carl had
hesitatingly accepted.

They move to a better apartment near the Hope Garden in New Kingston where Baba still
wished of buying a house someday. Baba reinvigorated his old production company,
Lions of Zion productions, and took sole charge of their affairs.

Baba was an astute businessman. He had struggled for years in ignominy and understood
the tricks of the recording industry rather well. He set out on a master plan to capitalize
their potential to the fullest.

Few months after the festival, in the winter, they embarked on what he called ‘Exploring
the roots’ Tour. He had embedded a journalist from a reputed international broadcasting
agency to document their tour; the journalist had been more than happy to accompany the
yet mysterious prodigy. As part of the tour, they traveled to different towns and cities in
Jamaica and played music inspired by the local ethos – the history, geography, people
etc. He had the itinerary loosely planned and they set out on their unique experience that
made them a household name in that country.

They started eastward from Kingston and in the next six months on the road, covered
over twelve different towns and cities – a week’s stay everywhere. At their first stop at
Morant Bay, they took the old sleepy town by surprise and revived its tourism fortunes by
shows that presented the, by now forgotten, only Peasant Revolt in Jamaican history. By
the third day people from nearby settlements flocked to experience the crash of cymbals
and rolls on the snare drum that vividly transcribed the suppression of peasants in that
very land, years ago. They regaled the audience to portrayals of fish-markets in the
fishing center of Alligator Pond. In the Hippies’ discovery, Negrill, Baba took the crowd
back to sixties with psychedelic sounds in collaboration with a local DJ. Towns of Port
Antonio and Ocho Rios, known for attracting artists and writers, received the classier side
of their music. In Port Antonio, they had an impromptu collaboration with a famous poet
in which Damru played the poet’s reminiscence of the coast of past to the very last tinge

81
of nostalgia the poem conveyed. In the city of Port Royal it was celebration of rum. Even
though neither of the artists indulged in alcohol, they played their take of ‘woo hoo hoo
and a bottle of rum’, the eternal pirates’ anthem, to commemorate city’s history of pirates
and some of the finest rum in the world. In Montague Bay, they had jammed with a
heavy metal band and Damru had thoroughly enjoyed the heavy notes. They had ended
their tour with a dedication to the locals in trench town. The kid had to hear the songs but
once to get the beats right. They covered songs of charted reggae musicians that had
come out of there.

Everywhere they went, they were flooded with requests for shows. They played at clubs,
parks, beaches and even private homes – quite often making the show free for everybody.
It was a trip none on it had ever experienced. To Damru it was life in a different world
altogether. Poor guy had to constantly adjust himself. There was no compromising his
morning chants or the practice sessions on the ‘Pashan-Mridang’. He felt nauseated by
the smell of alcohol and some of the venues they played at, it was so overpowering that
he had to form a shield of whole bunch of incense sticks around him. They were flocked
by women all around who didn’t seem to do much but stare at the musicians with lustful
eyes; and how badly they danced. Damru wasn’t impressed by any of the ladies that
joined them backstage, in their hotels, or on the road. They flocked to him like seagulls to
breadcrumbs and proposed all kind of amorous activities. He was more perplexed by the
attention than excited and approached any such situations with the nonchalance of an
infant, as the reporter with them had commented. He stayed his calm virgin self, well
shielded against untoward behavior by Baba Gari. In later days, they had security men to
save Damru from the continuous onslaught of fans. He was Baba’s life; Baba valued him
more than anything in this world.

By the end of the tour, he had enough control on English to understand and express
himself, but still none except Baba could claim to have talked to him for more than a
couple of minutes. He often had loss of ideas in expressing himself and blushed in such
situations. In the best of his attempts the documentary maker couldn’t extract more than a
few generic words from Damru; he had called Damru‘the kid who talks in beats’.

He actually did. To him beats were more than just pleasant arrangements of thuds and
ticks; to him they were a language. In one of the famous lines from the documentary,
when asked about his extraordinary ability to paint pictures on the drums, he had said, “I
see beats”.

Baba couldn’t have been more pleased with the success of the tour. Along with the fame
and exposure, he saw enough material for at least five album releases. The documentary
came out about a couple of months after the tour and the world was exposed to a
superstar. Baba brought out an album of their live recordings to time with the
documentary. The album started at number one on the Jamaican Reggae charts and went
on to be a worldwide hit. Baba bombarded the world with album releases every six month
as what was called the ‘Trip to Jamaica’ series. His strategy was not to create memorable
tunes; he created a memorable star.

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A memorable star he did create in the world of Reggae-fusion music. Damru who always
appeared as the featured artist on ‘The drifters’ records had soon moved on from prodigy
to a big star at thousands of radio stations worldwide. The rest of the band changed as per
Baba’s whims and needs; he couldn’t have any one outshine his boy, not even himself.
All of the musical credits, even though Baba’s contribution was equal, if not more, were
given to Damru as a matter of policy in his production company. The boy was his own
self and in Damru’s success Baba felt the satisfaction of a missionary on the spread of his
success. Damru hadn’t known distrust but hadn’t been used to trusting others either.
Other than his Grandmother and lover, Baba was the only friend he ever had. Baba knew
how to read him pretty well and was attentive to his slightest reactions. Baba took care of
his finances as well, with utmost faith and sincerity. Every six months fifty percent of the
profit was deposited in Damru’s bank account and a statement highlighting the deposit
was slipped in his bedroom, without a fail. Damru didn’t care much about money as long
as his needs were comfortably met.

They toured India after the release of the ‘Trip to Jamaica’ series and spent over nine
months criss-crossing through the country. The country of India had no dearth of talents
locally but the public adulation was heavily biased towards successes away from the land,
for some reason. Moreover, this was a nobody from nowhere in the non-state of Bihar.
They had the perfect dazzleThe country couldn’t have enough of this success story from
their backwaters. Everybody talked of the quiet, handsome young maestro (yes, they had
started called him a master, just about three years into his career) who sported dreadlocks,
worshipped Bhairav and saw beats. Was he an incarnation of Shiva? Some had
wondered. Indian youth found an icon; dreadlocks became fashion; persecuted and
bullied Bihari immigrants in bigger cities found a reason to show attitude about.

‘The Drifters’ played over two hundred shows, mostly in small towns and even villages,
all of them free for the public. Wherever they got sponsorship for stage arrangements
they accepted, elsewhere they spent their own. They lived and traveled with locals who
waited impatiently to receive the group in their towns and villages. Baba publicized their
gesture as a humble son’s exploration of the nation. It was an amazing exploration; they
liked every moment of it as much as everybody that came to hear them. They
collaborated with local musicians whenever possible- a vast majority of them being
impromptu duets in the tradition of the Indian classical music. Damru’s clash with Pundit
Jasraj in the temple town of Tirupati was reported as a fine musical Drama like of which
the doyen of Indian Classical singing had never sung. They did a month long tribute to
the Indian freedom struggle around the time of the country’s Independence day and were
joined by a bevy of artistes from all over the country. On the day itself, Baba conducted
an elaborate orchestra of over thirty famous musicians at the Jalianwaala Bagh in
Amritsar in the state of Punjab, site of a bloody massacre of innocent Indians during their
freedom struggle. The gunshots on the unarmed crowd, on the orders of the mad
Englishman, General Dyer, were felt again at the monumental park on that morning, as
the country’s prime minister hoisted the tricolor flag at the Red Fort in the Delhi. The
three-hour show ended with the shots of Udham Singh in the hearts of the ex-governor of
the state who had approved of the massacre. Years later Baba sold the recording of the

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show to a producer background score for a movie called ‘The butcher of Amritsar’ based
on a book by the same name. It won a couple of awards.

Most certainly, they went to Champaran as well. They were hosted by Thakur Ranjit
singh, who felt really important asking the foreign reporters to back off, when they
swarmed his house for glimpse of the celebrity guests. Damru and Baba had flown in a
state helicopter on Thakur’s roof and they couldn’t believe their eyes at the sight of
thousands of people surrounding the mansion. This had even Damru gasping in
exhilaration. They wanted him to say a few words from the rampart and all he could say
was ‘Jai Bhairav’, which, thenceforth, became a common greeting in the region.

They collaborated with local ‘Birha’ and ‘dhrupad’ singers and did a special show at
Ranjit Singh’s for his family. Baba was so impressed by one septuagenarian Birha singer
that he produced an album of her songs, set to reggae rhythm. Baba also wanted to give
music to the invocation dances but to their shock, every bit of occult practices had died in
the village of ‘Chuhaarmaati’ just a couple of years after Dushehri Devi’s death.

Damru’s first realization of the perils of fame was when he visited his village. He who
didn’t talk much, the world wanted to know all about. In such a situation if he decided to
pay a visit home, it was only expected that the brokers of public information would flock
like swarming bees. Damru couldn’t even have few minutes by himself to remember his
grandmother and life with her. Amidst the insane questioning and click of shutters,
Damru started crying like a baby and Baba had to frisk him away. The world saw the
tough young drummer crying in his rickety crooked home and he became a symbol of
human element in the increasingly inhuman world of entertainment.

Baba was able to fulfill his longstanding wish of visiting Varanasi. They played at a
music festival on the bank of the river Ganges, Ghats, as they called the riverbanks that
rose up in concrete steps. He was able to hunt some Aghoris down and had a brief
discussion with them as well, but, they didn’t seem as exciting as he had imagined; he
didn’t care much about them now anyway.

They released a bunch of successful albums at regular intervals after their India trip. On
being questioned about the rushing release, Baba commented that they have been able to
reach only about five percent of the humanity and their goal was to reach all; he wanted
every living soul to know them.

They did achieve unprecedented popularity. He followed his usual pattern of extensive
tours in which the materials were explored in what he called the concept-shows, followed
by release of those materials as concept-albums. This gave him a very good
understanding of which tunes worked and hence every time they released an album, it
was a mega hit and they built a very loyal following as well.

They had a remarkable tour of Africa where amongst musical achievements, baba learned
a lesson to forever abstain from all matters political. The country of Ethiopia hailed by
the Rastafarians as the land that was destined to liberate the black people had been a

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major disappointment as their prophet Ras Tafari was ousted and the country was taken
over by a bunch of warring factions. Around the time they made it there, the war-ravaged
country was holding referendum for division of the Promised Land. Baba was
heartbroken at the state of affairs there and gave in to his emotions. They were fortunate
to escape the goons of the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front
who hadn’t taken their propaganda of unity and peace lightly. They had to run away in a
Somali helicopter in the middle of the night their hotel was to be blown on. He was lucky
to have an admirer of the band amongst EPRDF’s commanders. The commander had
tipped them off about the plans of a strike on the hotel they were staying at. Had it not
been for the Somali Colonel, another fan, they’d have been turned to ashes. Anxiously
waiting in his room for the escape vehicle, Baba had sworn on his forefathers to never
indulge in anything political again and he kept the resolve lifelong. He never mentioned
the tip-off to anyone else in the group. Everybody including the media thought it to be a
miracle that they had left the hotel in Asmera, the capital of then provisional country of
Eritrea, just hours before an errant missile struck it.

They avoided troubled lands after that episode. Promoters tried their best to get them to
play in Lebanon but Baba clearly refused, so he did for a mega show that was put up at
the newly formalized Israel-Palestine boundary years later. During their trip of Europe,
riots broke out in France after the poverty and unemployment stricken immigrant
Africans couldn’t take it no more. The rioting was brought under control but it had
initiated a resurgence of concerns for the immigrant community amongst the sympathetic
masses. As it had become the trend in those days, they held a big show where all kind of
musicians performed and activists spoke on current urban problems and divisions in the
society; Baba refused participation to the shock of all. Their refusal to take sides or
political stands did bring about the only controversy they ever experienced, but it
accorded them a unique identity in the propaganda filled music fraternity. Some critics
hailed them as bearers of the essence of music, which Baba found quite amusing.

He had to pay for it by an abysmal attendance in their show, Musique de Louvre, as part
of Louvre’s bicentennial celebrations. What the critics called their best performance ever
was attended by hardly a thousand daring fans and tourists who were brave enough to not
care about the boycott. Damru’s interpretation of the famous fifteenth century painting by
Heironymus Bosch, Ship of Fools, was so perfect that one newspaper called it a classical
piece that dramatized the classic painting. Damru had used the Maori pu torino, a long
flute like instrument that produced such soft notes that perfectly portrayed the frivolous
and idyll setting of the work. They also featured a new instrument inspired by a loom in
which the tight strings across two beams produced a swishing that combined with bass
and cymbals produced the background of soft laughter throughout the tune. It was the
painter’s derision of the inconsequential indulgences of life. Baba released the show as an
album and that sold quite well in even France. At the end of the millennium when there
was frenzy in the media to come out with the best, worst and the otherwise significant
lists, this tune was featured in the most memorable tunes of the millennium by nearly all
who brought out such a list.

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They were no longer Jamaicans or Reggae arists, they became musicians of the world.
They traveled all over the world – more than 150 countries, in every single continent –
and collaborated with musicians of almost as many nationalities. They even did shows at
the Australian and Indian camps in Antarctica, to the displeasure of many researchers.
They played in the carnival on the streets of Rio and at the Super Bowl in America,
where millions of people experienced the thud of clashing American football giants
during the half-time break. Baba had a fascination with big celebrations and he tried to
cover as many of them in this world as possible. They were there for the millennium
celebrations at the Times Square; they were at the opening ceremony of the millenium’s
first Olympics; they were at the live 8 show in South Africa; they were at world cup
cricket and world cup soccer; they highlighted the celebrations of Mahatma Gandhi’s
125th birth anniversary; they even played at the celebrations marking the Golden Jubilee
of the British queen’s coronation, for which they were accused of being a sell-out to the
Babylon System; Their last big show together was at the Summerfest, on the shores of
Lake Michigan. He was a sucker for big crowds even though their trips were filled with
small venues. ‘Bigger dem familee at dem shows, bigger dem tunes you play’, he used to
say. It was true. They’d prep their fans with small shows in intimate settings and then
produce a big bang periodically in more exposed arenas. When they were not traveling,
they were planning their next trip and releasing albums.

They released over thirty albums, more than half of them platinum, in about twenty years;
and that required a lot of working. Theirs was a fast lifestyle and the temptations around
were strong. Damru was able to cope up with the rigors as well as the glitter because of
his nonchalance and discipline; Baba fell into the trap. Once he gave in to the lure of
flesh there was no stopping him. He, who had given Damru lectures on the essence of
control, lost it himself to the endless stream of groupies. He couldn’t have helped it. He
had no time to raise family or fall in love with a dame of his fancy; he was too busy
living the trip. The temptation to release is irresistible and when its available dime a
dozen, one can’t blame the fallen for the fall. Damru was extremely lucky to be stuck-up,
as many called him sometimes. He did have sex with a couple of his fans at random
moments of weakness but he never felt the urge to fornicate at large. He did want a
companion but none that came his way those days stimulated him even the least bit.

Baba contracted the deadly virus of AIDS from one of his gadzillion unscrupulous
associations and shot himself in his head the day he found out about it. They were over
twenty years into ‘The Drifters’ career, successful beyond imagination, and still
maintaining the creative pace. They had won the world and it spun for them; he had just
lost hope.

It couldn’t have been more devastating for Damru. He had lost the only friend, mentor,
manager, and partner he had. Suddenly, everything seemed alien to him. It was a shock
that people around him thought he would never recover from.

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He did recover. He found a purpose in work to provide hope to as many suffering from
AIDS as possible; the hope that his friend lacked. There was plenty going on in the world
for the estimation, vaccination and treatment of the scourge but there was so little being
done to add life to the remaining years of sufferers. Every body was really scared and in
its fear the society was prematurely terminating the ones suffering.

Thakur Ranjit Singh had suggested the idea to him in the following year that Damru
spent in a beautiful house that he had built in Shampur, the original village of his
ancestors. After Baba’s death, Damru couldn’t have lived in Jamaica anymore. Nothing
seemed the same to him and so he had decided to spend some time at his home while he
figured out what he could do next. Apart from finding a new purpose, Damru was also
able to find his lost father, who had been living in a government sanatorium for years.

Damru went on a major spending spree. He spent his entire fortune on his mission, which
was to provide hope to as many suffering from AIDS as possible. He started building
what he called ‘Seva Hospitals’ for AIDS patients, which were aimed at providing a
hopeful and dignified death to the suffering, amongst other facilities of research,
rehabilitation and out patient services. He had enough money to begin the entire venture
without much hullabaloo and it wasn’t till he had two such facilities built – one in India
and the other in Brazil – that the world paid attention to it. For the third one in Namibia,
he felt a crunch of funds and money literally showered in, in the form of donations. He
also released few albums and did shows every now and then, but they just weren’t the
same for him without Baba’s energy. He dedicated every show and album to Baba and
also gave him credits for all the music. Questioned about such a quirky devotion to his
friend, he plainly answered,

‘Baba still come my head. I nothing if he not there’.

In just a matter of less than ten years, he had built three Seva Hospitals in India, one in
Jamaica, two in Brazil, one in south Africa and one in Namibia before focusing on Ghana
where his attention was drawn by Bob Marley’s widow who had been living in the
country for a while. For the project he collaborated with the catholic group of which
Savannah Hesse was then a director.

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 The End

Amidst emotional rhetoric, Caroline outlined how she found it hard to believe the media
judgment and had refused to believe that her mother could have committed suicide. She
knew that Savannah hadn’t done anything wrong and there was no way on this earth that
could have made her mother take a step as drastic as death. She had to find the wrong in
her.

She said in tears,

“Everything everywhere was wrong except the dead lovers”

She had quit her job and followed every known trail of Damru and Savannah’s life. She
probed her aides, friends, other politicians but none seemed to have a convincing reason.
Knowing more of the details of her father, she understood it all the more why her mother
was attracted to the drummer but there were no twists that would have made the
attraction so fatal. None of Damru’s acquaintances had any reasons either. It was not till
she got to talk to people in Damru’s village that things started unraveling.

Thakur Ranjit Singh’s son, Sanju, had helped her interview the villagers and even though
nothing came out of talking to people from Damru’s clan, she couldn’t help getting stuck
to the fact that the Thakur’s son had snubbed a kid who had mentioned something about
Damru’s grandfather. She couldn’t completely get what the kid had said but her
interpreter’s refusal to translate it got her thinking. It took the art of seduction to get the
virgin guy talking. She refused to uncross her legs at the peak of his desires unless he
opened his mouth and told her what the kid had said. Baking in the heat of his first sexual
experience the young man had thought that they were in love and arranged for a detailed
interview with the kid from Damru’s clan.

Through much pain, she had been able to get hold of a probable story that she narrated on
the TV. As clear by now, the story was nothing more than the usual of human instincts
and the sins that feed on such.

The end of her interview was marked with few confessions that, she claimed, completed
the circle of sin.

The first one, she said, was Dool’s in which he had accepted poisoning his father’s son
and what he thought was his bride.

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Then there were a series of pictures – all but one were of the dying former president
Johnny Hesse in rags, on the streets; she had watched him die. The last one showed her
finger marks on dead Dool’s neck.

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