Once, while waiting for a friend on the sidewalk, near my apartment in St. Louis, I helped an old lady up on to the sidewalk. She too was waiting for a ride, and we got chatting. She was on her way to a hospital, she said. After she told me that, it occurred to her that maybe I didn't know what that was. She put her hand lightly on my arm, as people sometimes will in the US, and asked "Do you have hospitals in India dear?"

    In India this is just not done, and I would at first shrink from it, but here a light touch on an arm or a shoulder is often bestowed, even between complete strangers, especially of the opposite sex, as a way of signaling friendly intent. Certainly in the Midwest. I see this less often in Austin than I did in St. Louis.

    I said that we did have hospitals in India, but that they were not as well-appointed as in the US. I was at that time employed, for 20 hours per week, as a research assistant, by the Mallincrodt Institute of Radiology of the Barnes Hospital, Washington University's teaching and research hospital, designing and prototyping some hardware for our growing image distribution and archiving networks for digital chest x-ray, x-ray tomography, magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI), and (then very new) positron-emission tomography (PET) from which people like Don Snyder and Dave Politte were just beginning to coax the very first fuzzy pictures. For the rest of my 20 hours per week I was a student. The twenty hours of research assistantship paid for my tuition. And it paid also for my living expenses at the rate of $750 per month. My tuition for nine credit-hours, that is three courses, was close to $9,000 per semester --- if I remember right. That is how much private universities in the US cost. Public universities like the University of Texas (UT) at Austin are much less expensive. An equivalent tuition at UT would perhaps work out at around $2,000.

    I used to work in a lovely old two-story building called the Biomedical Computer Laboratory (BCL), catty-corner from the huge Barnes complex, and separated from the rather undistinguished (architecturally-speaking) Wash U medical school building by a narrow street. Barnes Hospital is a steel and concrete giant, colored in dusty faded yellows and deep somber browns, that has grown and grown over the course of many decades. The whole Wash U medical complex, comprising Barnes, the Jewish Hospital, the Children's Hospital, the Dental School, and the new MRI building, occupies some twelve to fifteen square-blocks, including multilevel parking --- a "block" in the US being roughly the distance between two traffic signals. Wash U was founded in 1853. I don't know when the medical school started up.

    BCL is a dainty little (two levels above and one below ground) building, carefully built with hard dark red brick of a kind I haven't ever seen in India. Soldiered to perfection. Finished in every loving detail. It is a pleasure to behold.

    Dave Politte and Professor Snyder worked at BCL on signal processing for the first PET images. The very funny Shippy (Professor Emeritus Harold William Shipton) was right there on the bench next to mine, almost every other day, in the lab, building one of his fancy new low-noise biomedical instrumentation amplifiers, and always talking to himself and his circuits --- mumbling indistinctly into his untidy little beard. He was of English origin, and had designed some early radars during the war in England. He was full of interesting radar stories. His poor physical condition was to me ample proof of the fact that RF (radio-frequency) is not kind to the human body. His eyesight was poor. His eyes didn't line up. His glasses would be smeared with flux, and knocking right up against the resistors he was soldering in with a shaky hand. His hearing was dismal, despite dual hearing-aids. And his front upper teeth jutted out, fanning out in a wide irregular circle over his lower lip. They were all sorts of colors, and looked like they might drop off any minute. His spine was a little bent. When he walked he was very careful, but it still appeared like he might stumble any minute. And yet he is a Prince among Men. (Among birds, a garuda. Among mountains, Meru. Among the apsaraas, Urvashi. Among the serpents, Shesha. Among cows, Kamadhenu. Among elephants, Airavat. Among little girls, Bui. Among babies, Gobinda.) One of the most wonderful people you could know. The sort of person that teaches you what it means to be a Man. He was kind and gentle, always grinning, always ready to explain his new method for biasing a transistor, always eager to learn something new, even from a lowly graduate student. I was forever on the lookout for some way to help him. I loved him dearly. When he climbed slowly up a flight of stairs I would catch myself wishing that he would let me lift him and carry him up the stairs. He was a slight and spare little man, and I could well have carried him up a few flights. His wife was a sad and quiet woman, who did sometimes smile (just a little) at Shippy's antics. She always stood close to him when she was there near him --- protecting him from everything and everyone.

    She was the daughter of Clement Attlee, prime minister of Britain when India gained her independence. Attlee's friend and colleague Stafford Cripps, later his chancellor of the exchequer (following India's independence, when Britain had to tighten its belt in consequence of the loss of  Indian loot), went to India at the head of the infamous Cripps Mission in March 1942. The Cripps Mission offered India "full dominion status" if the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Muslim League would agree to work with Britain in defending India against the Japanese attack that was then thought imminent. The Indian National Army (INA) of Subhash Chandra Bose was already fighting the Allied armies alongside the Japanese in Burma and Indochina, and it stood ready to march with Japanese help against the British in India.

    Cripps was cordially received by the INC and the Muslim League, but he quickly upset the INC by offering the Muslim League veto power in the proposed full-dominion provinces --- wherever the Muslims felt under-represented. This asinine proposal was hatched by the government of Winston Churchill --- very much in keeping with the British policy of divide-and-rule. Cripps was not given much discretion to negotiate terms by Churchill. The failure of the Cripps Mission was hardly Cripps'. In fact it owed everything to the evil genius of Churchill. If Cripps could have taken out the veto clause he could have carried the INC with him. As it happened, the INC turned down the Cripps proposal, and in April Cripps returned to report failure to Churchill.

    Following Cripps' departure Mahatma Gandhi called upon India to resist the Japanese by non-violent means --- perhaps blissfully unmindful of the fact that the Japanese were hardly the sort of people that could be expected to play along with his satyagraha games. It is perhaps more likely, given the consummate politician that he was, that the Mahatma was well aware that non-violent methods would not cut the mustard with the Japanese. That his call to offer non-violent resistance to the Japanese was just his way of signaling the British that just about any hare-brained and half-assed proposal was better than the mischievous nonsense Churchill was trying to get away with.

    Mahatma Gandhi must surely have been aware of the Rape of Nanjing, when, in 1937, the Japanese regular army, following Nanjing's surrender by the army of Chiang Kai-Shek had committed some of the worst atrocities of War. The Japanese soldiers killed 300,000 civilians within a matter of seven or ten days, using the most gruesome methods. Machine-gunning confined crowds of people was the least of them. People were killed by the sword in beheading contests. They were skinned alive. They were killed by degrees. Bit by bit. Babies were killed slowly with sharp pointed objects. People were hanged by their tongues. By their fingers and penises. Some 20,000 women were raped. Fathers were made to rape their daughters, sons their mothers, while the rest of the families were made to watch. Some women were raped as many as 50 times in a row. Similar atrocities took place in Shanghai. It would have been extremely interesting to watch the Gandhian method in operation against the Japanese! I am very sorry to say that I consider a nuclear bomb to be a more appropriate weapon to deploy against that sort of an army than a Gandhian satyagrah. I am very sorry to have to say that.

  When the failure of the Cripps Mission had sunk in fully, Mahatma Gandhi called for what was to be his last satyagraha against the British. This was the Quit India Movement that galvanized the entire nation, and made it most clear to even the most obtuse among the British that their days in India were numbered. All the INC leaders were arrested as soon as the Quit India call went out in August 1942.

  In 1945 Winston Churchill's Tories were thrown out of office. They had lost handily to Labor led by Clement Attlee.

  On Saturday before last I spoke to Vish on the phone, and he mentioned that he was reading Bankim Chandra Chatterji's "Anand Math" in Hindi. From there talk lead briefly to famines in Bengal, one of which forms the backdrop to the opening passages in the novel, and to the Quit India movement which was followed by THE Bengal famine that killed some 3.5 million people. That famine was the creation of the British, who were shipping massive quantities of grain out of India, even as people were dying for lack of it in Bengal. So I thought I'd mention this little connection between the Quit India movement and my life in St. Louis. It always surprises me how our history comes back in waves and drags us a little nearer to the deeper ocean of our lives.

  Also, speaking of Bankim babu, I should mention that the other day Abha found a CD at Waterloo Records in downtown Austin, near UT, called "Vintage Music From India --- Early Twentieth-Century Classical and Light Classical Music," Rounder Records, CD 1083, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Track 17 is a recording of Vande Matram made in "the late 1920's" and sung wonderfully by Vishnupant Pagnis.  I mentioned this to Vish on the phone, who, not everyone may be aware, is, in private life, a scholar of the history of the Indian cinema and cinema-music. Vish said ah yes, Vishnupant Pagnis, he was one of a trio that dominated movie music in Bombay in the thirties. Vish also told me that Vishnupant Pagnis was, in real life, an electrical engineer! [I found out later that I had mixed up two or three different musicians that Vish spoke about. Pagnis was not an electrical engineer.] Ever since I heard that I have been practicing my voice, trying to open unopened registers. Sing forgotten melodies. If one electrical engineer can sing like that, why the devil can't another? His song is wonderful. The timing is exquisite. I have heard that one track over 30 or 40 times at one sitting. It is only two minutes and fifty seconds long.

    This is what the sleeve-notes say about track 17: "In the late colonial period, nationalist performers like Vishnu Digambar Paluskar linked classical music to the anti-colonial cause, concluding recitals with the then-unofficial anthem Bande Matram."

  Surprisingly the sleeve notes say nothing about Vishnupant Pagnis himself.

  It also occurred to me, and I was discussing this with Abha, that, in view of the Rowlett Act of 1919, the one that precipitated the events that led to the Jallianwallah Bagh murders, it is quite likely that the singing of Vande Matram was banned at the time this recording was made. That would make the track twice as precious. It is not just a piece of exquisite music, it is also a big banana up the British rear-end!

  Vishnupant Pagnis sings three stanzas in his rendition. I had so far been familiar with just one: the last Now we need one of our Bengal Lancers to tell us whether Bankim babu wrote just one stanza, or whether he wrote all three. Or more. Abha says that she remembers that "Anand Math" opens with a few people singing Vande Matram, but that they sing just that last familiar stanza. Below is a transcript of Vishnupant's song. The maa is Mother India, of course. And this song will not make my blood race only after my brain has been sliced and diced and drowned in formalin. A song can sometime accomplish more than a whole army. Give your poets a voice, Mother India!

"Vande matram
Tumi vidya, tumi dharma,
Tumi vidhi, tumi murma,
Tvam hee praaN shareere.
Bahoo de maa shakti,
Hridaye tumi maa bhakti,
Tomarai protima gaDi mandire.

Vande mataram.

Tvam hee Durga dashapraharanadharini,
Tamlaa kamala-dal-viharini,
Vani-vidya daayani.
Namaami tvaam,
Namaami Kamalaa,
Amalaa,
Atulaa,
Sujalaa, sufalaa,
Mataram.

Vande mataram.

Sujalaa, sufalaa, malayaja sheetala,
Shashya shyamala mataram,
Vande mataram.
Shubhra-jyotsana pulkita yamini,
Phulla-kusumita droum-dala-shobhini,
Suhasini,
Sumadhur-bhashini,
Sukhdam varadaam mataram.

Vande mataram."

    I need some Sanskrit jock to tell me the meaning of "tamalaa".

    Back to BCL. Debbie, our lab technician, was a sweet, pretty, young lady from Belleville, Illinois. Belleville is a tiny little town along Interstate 64, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, to the south-east. Illinois was flattened by glacial flows from Canada during the Precambrian or (more likely) the Pleistocene to within a tolerance of plus-or-minus one centimeter (it seems) over hundreds of thousands of square miles, and most of the driving across it is a dead bloody bore. So flat is that land! The freeways run straight as arrows for hundred mile stretches. But not so in Belleville's neighborhood. There the land rolls gently, perhaps because of the ancient meanderings of the Mississippi-Missouri system. Perhaps because of tectonic activity --- for the great San Romano fault is close by there in Southern Illinois.

    Debbie did not like her supervisor, our chief lab tech Philip, at all. Whenever he turned his back to her, she'd stick her tongue out at him and make a face. Later, after I left Wash U, she divorced and married again. Both her marriages, it was my impression, perhaps insufficiently well-founded, were not of the happiest.

    John Chabut and I shared an office at BCL. He was, like me, a graduate student. I forget what he was building, but I do remember the big shroud that he liked to fix to the front of his oscilloscope. And he'd sit there on a stool with his head half-buried in the shroud, looking intently at his waveforms. I still have a picture of him, taken with my treacherous Canon, with him holding that shroud like a make-believe gun. In the afternoon it was our habit for a few months, to shut the door of our office, to stretch out on the thinly-carpeted floor in the middle of the room and catch a nap. One afternoon Professor Jerry Cox, my academic advisor, came looking for me to our office, knocked, heard no answer, walked in, and found us both sound asleep on the floor. I was then still too new to the US to not feel a little ashamed about that. That would never have been considered acceptable behavior at Bharat Electronics. After that day, if Professor Cox found the door shut and there was no answer to his knock, he'd just come back later, or call later on the telephone.

    John Chabut (spoken Shah-boo) now lives on Avon Way, Kettering, Ohio, near Dayton, with his very attractive wife, Jill, and three young children. I remember his entire address, but his zip and his street-number, because he has lived in that house ever since he left Wash U. His two sons, Craig-James and Neil, look a lot like him. They all three have the sort of faces you might find in a Norman Rockwell painting. Very American. With long sharp noses that stand out well ahead of them. The nose arrives before the person does. In fact, the nose gives you good warning that the person is well on his way. John's farewell gift to me was a big book of Norman Rockwell paintings that never fits in any size of bookcase. In the inscription he wrote that he hoped that the pictures will remind me of him. And they do. Very much so.

    The third little Chabut is a little girl called Alison. I remember telling John how, when I was still in high-school in Delhi, I saw a picture in the newspapers of a young woman mourning her dead friend lying there on the ground before her, turning her head to look up and back, stretching out an arm, wailing. That was Kent State University, Ohio, in 1969, I think, when four students were shot by the Ohio State or the (federal) National Guard on the Kent State campus during an anti-Vietnam protest. Does anyone else remember that picture? The name of the woman in the picture was Alison Krause. That name has stuck in my head all the way from my high-school days. I remember telling John that ever since I am saddened by the name Alison. Every year in December he sends me a picture of his chit-pits, and I have a whole sequence of them in an album, steadily growing, growing, growing. And now I have a new one, just a few days old.

    Once, when Abha was pregnant with Tunimai, and big, and beginning to waddle ("As swollen with child as a raincloud with water," wrote Valmiki in his Ramayana, of the first rakshashi, the imprudent and impatient wife of the gentle Sukeshu), we drove from St. Louis to Columbus, past Dayton, East on Interstate 40. I was on my way to a conference at the Air Force Technical College at the Wright-Patterson Airforce Base in Columbus, Ohio. On the way out Abha packed a picnic lunch of aloo-poori, achaar, and chai, that we ate somewhere by the roadside in Indiana. It was a warm spring day. There was a wonderful breeze. The sky was large and open and sparsely dotted with a few stray puffs of cumulous. We knew that that baby in her womb was our little Buramani that we had wanted forever. Some of that aloo, and achaar, and sun, and chai, some of that stirring breeze, that silence, and the lovely Sugar Maples under which we picnicked, I can still see in Buramai's eyes and hands.

    There is a big Air and Space Museum at Columbus. There we saw the huge B-52 bomber that dropped the Fat Man on Nagasaki. On our way back we stopped for a few hours at the Chabuts in Kettering. It was a brilliant beautiful day. We met the Chabut boys for the first time at their home. Craig-James was already beginning to collect stones and minerals, and wanted to be a geologist when he grew up. This year I find out that he won a belching contest at his summer camp, and that he wants to be an astronaut. There were yet a few years left before Alison's birth.

    Professors Charlie Molnar (now dead, and considered by some to be the father of the personal computer) and Fred Rosenberger worked at BCL on the design of machines that use a multiplicity of relatively-asynchronous clocks. The classical way to build a computing machine is to use a single multiphase set of clocks everywhere within the machine. This is called synchronous design. Every event in the machine then has meaning with respect to that one and only set of clocks. Everything happens in rhythm as clock signals rise and fall. Latches latch, flip-flops flip, and registers gorge themselves on fresh new data.

    But when the clocks run very fast, and the geography they traverse too extensive --- and this can even happen on the surface of a single wafer (wafer-scale integration), as people lay down billions of transistors on several thousands of square-millimeters of real-estate --- it becomes very difficult to maintain sympathy between the movement of clock voltages in two different regions of the chip. It becomes a problem to distribute the clock, and to communicate the sort of signals which can have meaning only in relation to some well-established clock. A different design-philosophy, and indeed a completely different kind of logic is needed when a single, universal measure of time is not available. Then people design relatively-asynchronous circuits that must use elaborate protocols to exchange information; where they would earlier have just latched data in at a rising clock-edge for example. Now every module must make sure that a circuit it receives information from has indeed completed its job, and that the data it presents is stable. Not squiggly. Not jumpy. The biggest headaches in high-speed digital design are analog! It is when our lumped approximations fail because of faster clocking and large geographical spread, when the Laplace equation comes out of its gufaa to govern line voltage directly --- dancing, hairy and naked, on the aluminum and polysilicon lines. That is when trouble really begins.

    At Bharat Electronics I had designed hardware using chips from Motorola, AMD, Intel, and Philips. Both the highly-dense MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor), and the sparser but faster (then clocking at a peak rate of 40 MHz) bipolar bit-slice chips. But it was only at Wash U that I learnt to design my own MOS chips from the ground up from Fred Rosenberger, a very calm, quiet, gentle person. "What is the American motto?" asked Professor Rosenberger. "It is this: if less is good, more is better."

    It was like magic to me at first to draw a pink rectangle of polysilicon (briefly, poly) over a green slab of n-type diffusion, and to know that a transistor had there been silently born, at the overlap of the pink and the green, where a voltage on the poly, delivered by a cold blue ribbon of aluminum, would control the flux of electrons across the doped green channel below --- like an electrically-operated toggle switch. It was hard to imagine that the complicated MOS charge-transfer equations, and capacitance, and turn-on and turn-off equations that governed state transitions from cutoff to near-saturation, and back, applied to structures this simple. And what a sense of power it gave one to make a gate with three or four or five transistors, and then a whole big row of flip-flops clocked in two phases, and bigger and bigger blocks, finite state machines and pipelined logic, entire machines, till the circuit sprawled everywhere, a mad and exhilarating riot of color. Carver Mead and Lynn Conway had just two or three years before published their path-breaking "An Introduction to VLSI Design," and every student in every EE department in the US was designing chips. It was the dawn of a new era. Fred Rosenberger was acknowledged in the Mead and Conway preface as one of those two or three professors that had helped refine the pre-publication text in a few experimental classrooms across America.

    I often went across from BCL to see Dr. Gil Jost, the chief of diagnostic radiology at Mallincrodt, whose office was on the eleventh floor at the western end of Barnes, overlooking Forest Park. Dr. Jost was my employer, and a most enthusiastic supporter of electronic picture archiving and communication in radiology. It was a personal mission with him. He understood the world of computers and electronics very deeply. Surprisingly so for a medical man whose speed and accuracy of radio diagnosis was reputedly without peer. I would enter the Barnes Hospital through the neuro-surgery entrance at the East end, and wander a little here and there, talking an unusual route at times before I finally arrived at Dr. Jost's like an errant electron drifting idly in a weak field. I got to see a few things that way.

    I saw once a guy slicing a human brain with a circular saw in a workshop where I'd often loiter in to borrow some tools, or pilfer some nuts and bolts and non-standard connectors. He had the brain all entombed in a solid plastic block, frozen rock solid. He'd turn the transverse feed worm on the table, give it a few millimeters, then go "zzzzzitt" down the brain, cutting off a slice. A mixture of cold and soggy brain tissue and warm plastic shavings littered the floor. He made the whole thing into some 20 slices cut longitudinally, front lobe fore and occipital lobe aft. He mounted each slice individually in an equal number of brackets filled with formalin. He was happy to have me around I think. I watched this for a couple of hours --- till he finished the job. "There," he said when he was done, "One day this could be my brain laid out here. Or yours."

    That made me shudder. I am squeamish about blood and needles and sutures, but the brain-slicing-exercise had that far just held me curious. Those slices were very pretty. They had all sorts of surprising colors in the most delicate hues. All sorts of strange little structures. All sort of detail that no one has ever seen on the screen of a CRT display. As for the mess on the floor, he just swept it up and pitched in the trash. And that was that. A lifetime of thought, memory, and desire, some of it in the trash, and the rest arranged in a neat long row on a table. The culmination of a life.

    So I was familiar with the feel of a US hospital, and I could compare it with what I had seen of the busy major hospitals in Bangalore, Madras, and Delhi, and of the numerous small, but nice and quiet, Railway Hospitals all over western India.

    I would often wave to Sherry when I passed her on the street thereafter and say hello. Like all old people she was always eager to stop and chat, but I'm afraid that I was not always as patient with her as I might have been. Had she been thirty years younger I would certainly have made time for her. It is not that I am put off by age. Quite the opposite, in fact. I find older women much more attractive. People age like wine, and the years give us a flavor that no firmness of flesh could sufficiently compensate for.

    I had been in the US for about a year then, and had not figured out how to meet any young lady in this country --- whether white, black, blue, brown, or yellow. There were few women in engineering school, and those that were there were already spoken for. I still don't know how people go about meeting and courting in the US. I know that there are pickup-bars, also called "meat markets", and some restaurants so designated by reputation, but surely those are good only for a few slam-bangs. I know that there are those wild frat parties on campuses where people sometimes get into each other's pants and skirts and shirts and undies, but that is largely an undergraduate phenomenon I think. I hear regularly on KUT 90.5, the Austin NPR (National Public Radio) station, a company (whose name escapes me) that advertises itself as "a relationship company", "not just a dating service, but a relaaationshipp company," says the advertiser in a smooth and insincere voice that falters at the exact moment when the greatest contrivance and conviction are demanded of it. Then there are entire churches that cater to singles desirous of getting to know each other in pious, spiritual, and religiously-controlled surroundings. Angels watching from above the tops of elaborate entablatures. Pure thoughts hovering in the fragrant air. How different a religious place smells from the odor of an average human armpit at a random time of day!

    And do people go there to worship Him who gave his life so that we may live; and only incidentally to engage in holy matrimony? Or do they go there driven by the many million years worth of lust programmed into their marrow by the mechanics of sexual reproduction, and put up with the sad drones that try and sell them religion with stale zeal and fractured conviction only because they are part of the package. "Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse," wrote T. S. Eliot in his "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". His father, the Right Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, was, for a number of years, the Chancellor of Washington University.

    When I was in Bangalore I thought I had the whole game figured out. Good girls from good Kannadiga and Pappan (Bangalore slang, sometimes slightingly used by Kannadigas, or self-deprecatingly by Tamilians, for the many long-time Tamilian residents of the city) families were forbidden fruit, especially for interlopers from the rude and noisy North. (Saar, pleej, kind Madam, hum north Indians ko bhi ek mauka de kar dekhiye.) These good families perhaps experienced the same feelings of dis-ease and disgust against the hordes of northern professionals that descended on Bangalore in the 1970s, that the southern states of Khandesh, Ahmadnagar, Berar, Bijapur, and Golconda must have entertained against repeated siege by the relentless  Moguls in the 1570s. The homes that I most felt welcomed in in Bangalore belonged either to the Mangalorean Catholic or the Coorgi community --- that were themselves somewhat marginal to mainstream Bangalore. The only people I have abiding ties with in Bangalore are Mangaloreans and Coorgis.

    The number of nubile females signaling, with muted flashes of luciferin (that nonetheless appeared blazingly incandescent and incendiary in the romantically-dismal shub-e-taar of the city), their willingness to operate under free-market conditions was seriously limited in Bangalore. In view of the great imbalance in numbers on the two sides of the free-market sexual divide in the city of those days, such a woman was therefore pretty much guaranteed her choice. It was also clear that Mother Nature did not consider most of the Bangalore males worthy of gene-propagation. I should have known, had I not been such a very dull bulb, that to any smart lady of moderate or higher intelligence, even fractionally-aware of the price of onions, I made zero economic sense. Zip. I was a good backup card, good to keep handy just in case the main event didn't show up, but not much more. There soon came a time that within days of my being merely sighted in the harmless vicinity of a nubile female, everyone would receive a happy red-and-gold card, gaily festooned with circles, vines, flowers, elephants, cows, and other such unequivocal and unabashed --- even gleeful --- signs of felicitous fertility, announcing her incumbent, firm, or unbreachable betrothal to some fine, sleek marketing manager (or two) that worked for Madura Coats, or India Tobacco, or Hindustan Lever. Once I even lost a friend and a sweetie, each to the other.

"Zikr us parivash kaa, aur phir bayaan apna
Bun gaya raqueeb aakhir, thaa jo raazdaan upnaa."
(Mirza Asadulla Khan Ghalib)

"I mentioned her ravishing beauty, and described something of my involvement. And (would you know it) he who had hitherto been by confidant, came to be my rival."

Suraiya in Sohrab Modi's "Mirza Ghalib" (1954)

    The social status of the electrical engineer, that labored for one of the public sector behemoths in Bangalore, was superior only to that of the city scooter-rickshaw driver, and his product was found in no way to compare with the luster of strong taaga from Madura Coats, or the sugandha of good saabun and fine green chumpi-tel from Lever, or, best of all, a satisfying sutta from India Tobacco. In the city of Bangalore, electrical engineers then appeared to far outnumber the combined forces of all other professions.

    The once-stately and central M.G. Road in Bangalore --- no one ever bothers with the deacronified name, much like B.B.D. Bagh in Calcutta --- is punctuated at its West end by a monstrous marble mountain, fashioned in the frightening likeness of the corpulent and scowling Queen Victoria. She appears, in that rendition, as also in certain others I have seen, to be suffering from a serious and simultaneous incidence of diarrhea and flatulence. On this M.G. Road, on the far side from Gangaram Book Stores and the Bombay Dyeing towel-and-bedsheet store, and other fine miscellaneous dukaans, there would often be found a totaa-wallah sitting on the sidewalk, trying to interest the passers-by in paying him to have his totaa tell their future. The totaa was a fine, sleek fellow. He always looked rather sulky and uncommunicative when in his cage. But when let loose among the neat rows of little slips of paper that had inscribed on them, in a neat and curious hand, a multitude of comforting future scenarios (laced with a few stray warnings, like remaining bits of heeng in delicious daal), he would strut about like a sahib looking through the natives' petitions, raising his brows at this and that, making a few quick calculations in his head, scratching his crown with his fine and pointed claws in perplexity at some serious tangled mess of a life. There was a zest and a zeal in his step that the hopeful wretches that came to consult him would have done well to emulate. Once the totaa had a handle on the situation he would carefully extract from one neat row, one slip, barely disturbing any of the others, and present it to the totaa-master to read to the hopeful open-mouthed source-of-revenue. The totaa-master would take a good while reading and explaining that slip of paper. He would illustrate the spare text with stories and parable. Embellish it with advice and admonition. He would gently coax from the client a complete sketch of the situation, put some hair on the bald facts of the case, arrive at a something approaching a diagnosis, and try and put forth a clean and comprehensive course of therapy.

  I used to think what a fine thing it would be if I could set up an establishment alongside the totaa-wallah, and forge with him a bond of business-collaboration, where he would direct to me all the ladies looking for an economically-viable mate. Then I would arrange their marriage to a private-sector marketing manager, given my historical connections with one of their main birthing channels. Then these satisfied customers, the sexually-fulfilled and economically-sated ladies, would go right back and bring to the totaa-wallah a new disgruntled friend, a faded unmarried aunt, or whoever, to start a new cycle, and soon we'd have a roaring business with turnover exceeding Bharat Electronics.

    If it had not been for a woman from Delhi (a woman without an economic bone in her body) that noticed the hapless Dipti Engineer and decided that that was the man for her, I may still be at large. She made her decision and told her friends at college that she had met the man she was to marry, but she neglected to tell the object of her attention, who therefore went on chasing the pointless popsies of Bangalore, when he may have spent his time to better advantage in gardening, or walking the dogs, or doing something similarly civilized. It is about this sort of a situation that Mirza Ghalib wrote:

"Koi mere dil se poochhe tere teer-e-neem-kash ko,
Yeh khalish kahaan se hoti jo jigar ke paar hota."

    Those that haven't heard Begum Akhtar sing those lines, they haven't been to Heaven.

Suraiya in Sohrab Modi's "Mirza Ghalib" (1954)

    So Abha and I took a tortuous route towards each other, but all's well that ends well. She must have known something I didn't know. In the matchless hexameter of Tulsidas:

"Manu jahi racheu, milihi so baru; sahaj, sundar, saanvaro
Karuna nidhan, sujaan sheel, sanehu jaanat raavro.
Ehi bhaanti Gauri asheesh suni Siya sahit hiya harshi ali
Tulsi Bhavanih pooji puni puni, mudit-mun mandir chali."

   Sunday, January 4, was the thirteenth anniversary of our wedding.