Karma, Knees, Bank & Sim Card Tricks And The Coming Of Age

“More sinned against than sinning

Always a loser, never winning —

But resilient in this negative fate

He resolved to fight back--

It’s never too late!

Now tired of being the underdog

He undertook the rock-hard slog

He thought no matter how strait the gate

He’d defy destiny —

It’s never too late…”

— From Jeopardy to Chowpatty by Bachchoo

“When I was a child, I thought as a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; — but now that I am a man…” I think that the childish pranks and prejudices of childhood are recorded in some register of karma and catch up with you in your advanced years.

OK, I’ll tell you what this, perhaps enigmatic, opening means. Yes, it’s not quite what St Paul went on to say in Corinthians (13:11). He said he put away childish things. So did I, I suppose, but then the karma knocked insistently.

As teenagers, my friends and I would gather in gangs in the evening and walk to the Main Street — Mahatma Gandhi Road — in Poona to the Café Naz for half a cup of tea — known to the locals as “cutting chai”. We would, most days, encounter an old Parsi gentleman who would be shuffling along at half the pace of a snail, and we’d stop and greet him and ask him what the matter was, and had something happened to slow him down?

At every encounter he seemed to forget that we had posed exactly the same questions the day before or the last time we met — perhaps for the hundredth time. He would make a sad face and say in Gujarati “What can I do? It has overtaken me! I have water on the knee! — “Soo karoo, gootthan ma panithaigayoon..”

Of course we’d pretend to sympathise, but the object of the whole encounter was to hear him say the same thing again and again.

And now, gentle reader, I shuffle along as I walk — faster than the proverbial snail and looking as confident and breezy as I can — but with some discomfort in the knees. I’ve been told I need a knee replacement soon. So gootthan ma pani it is! Then again, in a completely innocent way, when hanging around street corners in a gang, and a person with a bald head passed by, we with rich locks would shout “karom board!” as a taunt. That was supposed to mean that his baldness appeared like the polished surface of the board of that game.

And now — yes! — the receding hairline is slowly tending to…

Indeed karma works!

As I’ve said in the first paragraph of my autobiography, called Fragments against My Ruin (How many flipping times have I told you not to advertise your rubbish here? —Ed.), the first time I realised that I was getting on was perhaps when, on alighting at Mumbai airport I was accosted by 20 taxi drivers all shouting “Uncle, uncle, uncle!” to get my attention.

And then my lovely litt agent Priya called me to say that Karthika at Westland wanted me to write my autobiography. Was that a decisive call from the leveller TIME?

It was published in India, and then my friend Tariq Ali, who was one of the founders of Verso, the most prominent left-wing publishing house in Britain, said Verso would publish it internationally. He said he was writing his autobiography for them and then added “my dear, we’re all on the runway!”

One absorbs these aphorisms and thinks of Khayyam saying “awake my little ones and fill the cup, before life’s liquor in its cup be dry?”

Then the British Indian film festival invited me last year to receive a “Lifetime Achievement” award — again a flattering but ominous distinction?

Yes, all these calls for attention and invitations are indicative, and some are welcome. Poets such as W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot despair at ageing: Yeats says old age plagues him as a tin can tied to a dog’s tail. And Eliot says he grows old and shall wear the bottoms of his trousers rolled — which probably means he’s getting shorter?

Then of course there is Dylan Thomas who writes “rage, rage against the dying of the light...” Yeah fine, he wants to live forever, and that may be an admirable ambition, but this raging strikes me as an avoidable waste of emotion and time. Raging changes nothing Dylan dear! And after all the raging, he didn’t survive to read this!

Yes, the light recedes — so many metaphors: Tariq’s runway, the cliché twilight, Tennyson’s tide which “turns again home”…

But enough of this! Readers who follow this column will know that I complained about the extreme, unexplained bureaucracy imposed on me by Standard Chartered bank where I have a long-standing account. My description of my trials in this column yielded results. SC read the column and assigned an efficient operative called Shalini to straighten all this out. So it was assigned and so it was done!

Except that inexplicably my card was again suspended — embarrassingly, as I was attempting to pay the dinner bill for my guests who then had to pay. Standard Chartered guilty!

I also moaned in my previous columns about the absolute impossibility of getting an Indian sim card. Yes, folks I tried again! Success? Abject failure? Guess!