Ten minutes that shook a quiet world

One thing I’ve always loved about RK Narayan is that he could observe little slices of every day Indian life, without being pedantic or judgmental. Observing is something we don’t do anymore as a nation — replacing it with a bombardment of Instagram reels where young people dance to ‘Bongo cha-cha-cha,’ or whatever is the latest trend that, if not followed, would immediately kill them.Given that, in my mid-40s, I’m aging disgracefully, I have one of two choices with this column. Either to go in the direction of the young, and stay up with Twitter media outrage, and shout about every hashtagged injustice till I combust.Or go in the opposite direction, and give you a gentle Narayan-ish slice of Indian life, that you can read, in your mid-50s, content after a Sunday lunch, just before a snooze that turns to snoring, from which you are woken from by a smack on the head from your wife.If you, dear reader, are plump in a way that the morning walk doesn’t help, settled in mid-life, an embarrassment to your children, certain that the years of ‘Anything is possible!’ is replaced with ‘This is enough,’ then this column, from now into forever, is dedicated to you. You are my audience. You are also me. I must confess, I have an affinity for getting haircuts from old-fashioned barbers. The word ‘stylist’ frightens me. This barber gent comes home, tells stories, gossips, cuts hair, takes gossip away. I don’t entirely trust him and never have, but that’s half the fun.Last Sunday, while I was getting my hair cut, I was confronted by a delivery man from XBasket (name changed). I usually do it on the ground floor of my apartment building, which is both weird and frowned upon. The XBasket man looked at me strangely, and I couldn’t understand why I was getting my hair cut sitting on a chair on the ground floor of my apartment building.‘Is this a salon?’ he inquired. ‘No,’ I replied. We had no further conversation for a couple of minutes, as he processed the information. And then, still bewildered, he asked, ‘Is this a house then?’‘Yes’, I said. He pressed a few bells to the apartments. Clearly, the person that ordered had not put down a flat number.‘Do you have my OTP?’ he asked me. ‘No’, I replied, ‘I didn’t order anything.’ ‘Do you know who might have?’ he insisted. ‘There are seven flats in this building,’ I explained. And then, driven by mischief, I added, ‘What is the order?’‘I am not allowed to tell you that,’ he said officially, and then said, unofficially, ‘One chicken, one papaya...’‘I hate papaya,’ I told him. ‘Me too,’ confessed the delivery man. ‘I think Flat 501 ordered this. He seems crazy enough to eat chicken with papaya,’ I said. The delivery man laughed.The barber said, ‘It is a nonsense fruit. They eat it in Thailand. That’s why I’ve never been to Thailand.’‘What kind of third-rate person does not display his flat number?’ asked the delivery man, exasperated. ‘The other day, I was watching the Euro and he told me to turn down the volume,’ I said, adding fuel to fire.‘You’d have to be mad to not watch the games. The French game was the best,’ said the delivery man, shocked and upset at 501. One last attempt at the bell yielded no results. The delivery man turned to leave, now filled with hatred for 501.Before leaving, he sheepishly asked me, ‘If you don’t mind, why do you need a haircut? You have very little hair.’I didn’t say a word. ‘You want this chicken?’ said the XBasket man, in a conciliatory, guilty way. ‘No’, I said, hurt.And I never saw him again. However, in those ten minutes, a mistaken OTP, Flat 501-bashing, papaya analysis, and bald-shaming allowed for a kind of bonding that only happens in India.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2UnJiAF