Obit.
Jehangir Sohrab Jehangir (d. 2000)

Ram Gopal Mukundan
(IITK, Class of 1974)

Jehangir Sohrab Jehangir or 'JJ' as we knew him, was an unforgettable figure for me personally in my IIT Kanpur years and afterwards. JJ was more entertaining than anybody I knew in college. He had less respect for authority than anyone I knew. JJ was large in body, and expansive in spirit. His possessions and his time were unreservedly at his many friends' disposal.

JJ's room was a frequent haven for many classmates, myself among them, who wanted a respite from the severe demands of first year. When yet another opaque lecture had wasted a morning, then to flop out in JJ's room with its old Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder was welcome solace.

It didn't matter at all that JJ himself usually was fast asleep in the room .. if one had a mind to listen to Baez or Dylan, then one put on the tape recorder and sat in a corner, soaking in the music. Only an explosion could awaken JJ, so any noise short of that was fine.

If he liked somebody, then differences of opinion were dismissed with a pithy "What a c**t you are!" The term used was slang for a portion of female anatomy. "C**t!" was a Swiss Army knife of an expletive, able to express disdain, amusement, chagrin, contempt, affection, annoyance and any other current emotion. Usually the exclamation was accompanied by a sardonic smile. But when JJ's face turned bright red, when his noble nose turned scarlet, then watch out!

His friends in IITK were bemused by JJ's easy assumption that things would, "Of Course", work out all right, even when less than minimal academic effort was put in. To be fair, JJ did occasionally copy out whole reams of paper uncomprehendingly, in an effort to hand in pending assignments. He had a phenomenal memory which became apparent from time to time.

In my case, it was JJ who suggested my TA 101 (Engineering Design) project. The physical result was a crude wheel of plywood bound with copper wire, adorned with a steel needle teetering across the top on razor blade pivots, this contraption purporting to be a sensitive electric current balance. Most important, JJ remembered where the relevant equations were to be found: and these I copied in happy ignorance, JJ-style, into the project report.  When the grades came out, I got an A. By that time JJ had decided that he didn't want to stay on in the IIT, and didn't do any project at all, so he got an F!

Then there was JJ's old bike, BMC 993. Who knows where the old 350 cc Enfield is now, probably melted by some steel works and rolled into katoris decades ago. My most striking (literally) encounter with the old Enfield was in the company, not of JJ, but George Eapen who had borrowed her. The two of us went off, George riding the bike and me on the pillion, to visit a cousin of mine. We reached in good time, conversed, and then the visit ended. Back we both climbed on the saddle of BMC 993, George having kicked the engine into thudding life. As I turned round on my perch to wave goodbye, George twisted the throttle. The old bucket of bolts took off with a lurch. But not with me. I had slid backwards off the pillion seat and was now wondering how I came to be sitting on the tarmac!  

On the few times I rode behind JJ I learned from the great man himself my today's technique of crossing a speed-breaker rapidly. The method is modelled on JJ's traversal at high speed of the speed bumps on the road from the main gate to Hall-I. Looking like a rocket-propelled Buddha with a hook-nose, JJ would thunder up to the speed bump at 60 kmph .. the trick was to hit the bump obliquely to lessen the jolt. A special treat was to ride anywhere with JJ in cheerful 'spirits' .. after imbibing several pots of 'special tea' served up by the obliging staff at Red Rose.

JJ was a bridge fiend, and would trump and no-trump every night till the sun came up early in the morning. At about 11 at night, he could be seen striding the corridors yelling "need a fourth for bridge, need a fourth for bridge" (the game of course pitting two pairs of players against each other). JJ's cry meant that there were three ready players merely lacking a fourth man in order to begin. When JJ'd found the 'fourth', then that man would be parked in JJ's room and told to wait for a while. Out JJ would sally again, raising the same cry in different hostel wings, "need a fourth" -- until he'd assembled two more suckers. Then the serious work of the night would begin !

I'm happy to have introduced JJ to that comfortable if inelegant non-garment, the lungyi (i.e. tehmat). But this is probably taking undue credit. Senior Under Officer Pandey was the man responsible for JJ's discovery of the lungyi's virtues of comfort combined with spaciousness (important for someone of JJ's large girth!). 

SU/O Pandey, with his bristling moustache and military mien, was determined that Hall-II Mess should be as regimental as possible.  One fateful Sunday morning, Pandey barked ferociously at some unfortunate first-year lungyi wearer (not me) who had wandered groggily into the mess for breakfast. Only trousers and shirts in the mess were acceptable! The offender must leave immediately!

News of the lungyi reprimand reached JJ and others of the 'Bombay group', that particularly cosmopolitan bunch.  Straight away a revolt brewed. Waves of resentment all day swept along the first-year corridors of Hall-II. A protest had to be made. As soon as JJ discovered what was afoot, he marched into my room and demanded a lungyi for himself. I gave him one. In the evening, a whole angry bunch of first years trooped into the mess -- but not in the well-clad style 'required' of them. Instead the mob of us wore real lungyis, plus curtains, bedsheets, bath towels etc. etc. all swathed across our lower limbs. Helpless in the face of superior numbers, Pandey and his cronies glowered from a corner. 

Thenceforth all dress codes collapsed in the Mess. What's more, JJ had discovered the joys of being able to attend to nature's calls, both fore and aft, without unzipping anything at all! From that day on, JJ was to be found either wearing his trademark blue Levis, or in a lungyi.

After JJ was invited by Prof Tharu to find scope for his talents outside IITK, he still maintained links. For one thing, he decided that he'd learn flying in the Lucknow Flying Club at Amausi. Entry at that time was easy, Lucknow was close to IITK where he had plenty of friends, and there was a tolerant uncle to stay with. The uncle's stately name, Jehangir Firdaus Jehangir, was echoed by JJ's own. And of course JJ's family could afford the phenomenally high training fees .. an astounding 105 rupees per hour. Remember this was thirty years ago. JJ eventually rose to be an unofficial instructor to many tyros. In the neta-babu era many an entry to the flying club came about because of influence. One of his students I remember was a relative of some politico or the other.  Sent off on his first solo cross country flight, this student landed up at Bareilly instead of Rae-Bareli or some such. "He said his finger on the railway line on the map jerked because of turbulence", said JJ, "but the silly c**t didn't explain how his aeroplane jerked fifty miles onto the wrong railway line!"

About this time is when JJ paid several visits to IITK's airstrip. Capt.Nanda the airstrip manager took objection when JJ did this for the first time. Nanda threatened that he would chain the plane to a tree. Coolly, JJ informed him that the Kanpur Flying Club had superior authority over the IITK landing strip (true) and that he, JJ, had landed at Kanpur and taken permission first. Nanda received unwelcome confirmation of this over the phone. Hed was furious, but helpless to do anything.

One summer vacation, as usual I was in residence. IITK's kind teachers were giving me special attention, since they felt that an 'F' in maths or communications would not do. This was kind of them, and I thank them today whenever I have to invert a matrix or do a Fourier transform at a moment's notice. Coming back from a morning tutorial, I saw up in the hot sky a small yellow plane buzzing the academic complex. This was JJ's way of announcing that he'd arrived from Lucknow. So I hotfooted it to the airstrip.

Sue enough, there was a single-engined Piper Super Cub parked on the apron. Capt.Nanda had gone off to sulk in his house. In the hangar chatting with the supervisor was JJ himself. "Coming to Lucknow?" was his greeting.

Of course I was!

So we crawled into the tiny aircraft. The cabin was slightly larger than the inside of a family refrigerator. JJ was flying, unusally from the front seat (solo flying calls for the pilot to sit in the back). I got in the back, the door was closed, and the buzzing rose to a howl as JJ took off. We flew over the GT Road, some fields, then crossed the Ganga at a thousand metres or so height. JJ turned back in his seat and yelled over the noise:

"Want to fly her?" he shouted.

I looked at the cabin floor, there was a pivoted socket for a stick there. "Yes!", I yelled back. "Just undo the stick and pass it back to me."

JJ yelled back, "Don't be a c**t!"

Then he bawled that I was to undo the seatbelt. JJ would crawl into the back seat while I simultaneously slithered into the front seat. 

Slithered is the right word, since in that tube of a cockpit only two pythons could pass each other in opposite directions without getting stuck. Neither JJ nor I was slim.

"OK !", I screamed.

I have only a hazy memory of the contortions we went through. But I do remember that the plane pitched & rolled in some protest. I found myself in the 'front office', with the stick in my hand and feet on the metal rudder pedals. The sweet little plane settled down to level flight. At one stage I timidly patted the throttle lever, only to find a plump hand from the rear seat come forward and thrust the lever to "Full". The plane soared upwards. A large Indian Air Force radar installation passed below on the starboard side, defending the motherland against China, Pakistan, and Jehangir.

Just before Amausi, JJ's home base, we repeated our midair gymnastic manoeuvre in reverse, and JJ landed the plane.

There followed a long boozy evening at two or three houses involving JJ's buddies. We visited the hospitable family of one of the cutest and nicest Loreto Convent girls to have come for an IITK CulturalFest (she later married an IITKian). Thereafter JJ and I 'flowed' towards an evening with JJ's uncle, JJ's younger brother and a celebrity, Billy Arjan Singh of the Dudhwa Tiger Sanctuary, who was a friend of the older Jehangir. Things get blurred. That evening is hazy in my memory.

But what I do remember, is that the next morning we woke at 5:00 am, rode an ancient Matchless ex-army bike to the airfield, and then JJ took me up again in his yellow hornet. This morning, there was no midair circus. Just the pure joy of flight. It was a clear morning, I remember that vividly. From 1200 metres high, JJ pointed to the northern horizon. Sparkling serenely in the sunlight was a 100-degree arc of the Himalaya, every peak gleaming like a gem in a priceless white necklace. It was surreal to realise that Lucknow's teeming streets were directly below.

After we landed, JJ remarked that just the previous week he'd taken up his dhobi's family one by one .. "because they couldn't have flown in a plane unless I took them." One of them actually had thrown up in the plane, but that didn't stop JJ from taking up the rest turn by turn.

JJ for a brief period owned a cycle rickshaw in Lucknow. He bought it new for one thousand five hundred rupees. I never fathomed why. By the time I heard about this from JJ, he no longer owned the rickshaw. He'd donated it to the rickshaw puller gratis.

He was an inveterate bachelor, but seemed to have one or two attractive female friends. One by one I think they grew tired of waiting and married other, much staider, men. In the years after I graduated he visited with one of his girlfrieds. We were on the first floor. "Muk you bastard!" he yelled cheerfully from downstairs, almost provoking our sober lawyer landlord to evict us. There was some explaining to do after JJ's visit. A couple of months later, JJ and we attended the girlfriend's wedding to an accountant. Boozing enthusiastically at the reception, JJ appeared not at all disappointed! 

Some years later he visited us. A month earlier, he'd sailed across the Arabian Sea to Muscat in a weekend toy boat with another mad Parsi friend. On the evening he visited us, staying with us was a tall young English girl, almost six feet, who was bicycling round the world. JJ, all of five-foot-two did his best to persuade her to pay him a visit in Bombay. For all I know she might just have done that.

JJ had a spell in his older brother's successful travel agency. But his heart never was in it. For years he stoutly (appropriate word!) resisted going outside the country despite being ordered to do so. Eventually he was persuaded to go by a friend who had him smuggle out a tiger skin to England. JJ had no moral compunctions about this, despite his family's friendship with Billy Arjan Singh. His actions were ruled by what he felt like doing. To JJ's credit, what he often felt like doing was helping out those people he approved of. And these included his friends, his dhobi, a rickshaw puller, his boatman and so on. Cocooned in family affluence, JJ had no special bond with the wealthy as such. His rich buddies were just one part of his very wide social circle.

Eventually JJ found happiness but not in a woman's arms. An English friend of his, an old timer who had stayed on in India after Independence, owned a boatyard in Bombay building sailing boats for enthusiasts. As a member of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, he was a drinking and sailing buddy of JJ's. When the Englishman decided to finally leave for Home, he chose JJ to take over the boatyard. JJ quit the travel agency. He ran the boatyard for many years. As far as I know, JJ's yard was still building boats when he died of throat cancer, the legacy of years of puffing away.

I trust JJ died happy. That was his nature. I can't imagine him brooding. In the last days he may have spent a moment's thought on his woes and any enemies he might have. 

I'm sure he dismissed the entire lot with a brief sardonic smile and the muttered expletive "C**ts!"