The Man and his Machine

I think the first washing machine in the vast subcontinent was set up at Narmada hostel.

The parts looked like they had been salvaged from a WWII Jeep abandoned at the Ledo Road in Burma. Any possible doubt was put to rest when the machine was started. It clattered and vibrated with the gusto of a jackhammer at a metro project. There was just one cycle — Run! — which got the job done without the help of any wash, spin, rinse, bob, weave, duck… or dance routine. You put the clothes in, ran the machine until it started to lose water, then you took them out.  

But then, you didn’t have to do all that.

For the man behind the machine was the hostel dhobi, Deaf Dhobes. A lean man with deep-set piercing eyes, he wore a twisted grey beard that looked like it was being wrung out by the machine every Tuesday. He was missing several front teeth and several others rattled when he spoke. He talked a wheezy Tamil as though he personally suffered the plumbing disorders of his machine. These words were also long lost by the time they whistled past his teeth and filtered through his beard. You could have easily mistaken him for a sanyasi, had he swapped his checkered green lungi for a plain saffron one. He was also mostly deaf.

His relationship with the washing machine was not unlike a mahout’s with his elephant. They worked together, laid together, abused each other, and worked together all over again. He was its flogger and caretaker.  

The washing ritual worked like this. You set your dirty laundry out by your door, in the plastic bucket that you normally parked in your room, on the bottom shelf of the inbuilt masonry cupboard. When Deaf Dhobes knocked at your door, you pulled out the blue packet of Nirma (remember that TV jingle? Washing powder Nirma... [down four notes]... Washing powder Nirma... [up five notes]... Nir-Mah!) from the top shelf and handed it over to him. Dhobes would expertly dispense three spoonfuls without a spill and lock it away in a corner of a soiled shirt-tail, sealing it within a flamboyant knot. I think he also took a bit of money as his service charge, before he moved on to clean up your neighbor’s mess.

The bucket would be back at your door by late evening. There was no apparent identification or sorting algorithm. Deaf Dhobes just remembered each student’s clothes, or their buckets. The clothes themselves were inside; tightly wrung out, and coiled limply upon each other like snakes at an Indiana Jones reunion. The drying was left to you.

When you finally got to wear the clothes, large parallel wrinkles would run obliquely across your torso, like some alien exovascular system. Ironing them out, of course, was out of character at IIT since it was pain for no gain. That damp-sweet scent of the wash got so imprinted in your brain that had you bottled it up back then and opened it up now — decades later — you would still home in on it like a hog after a truffle. 

There was more to Deaf Dhobes than met the eye. His room was next to the one that housed his machine and I remember once finding him in a yogic headstand, arms folded beneath him. He was locked in a trance and took a while to get off his stance.  When I beseeched him with my unscheduled wash, he gestured by touching two fingers to the lips shrouded behind his flowing mane.  I got the message. I pulled out a beautiful gold-and-red packet of Gold Flake Kings and gave him one of the two or three precious cigarettes nestling inside. Over time I would give him several more.

During the big cyclone of 1984, it rained buckets for days. Hostels were marooned. Classes were suspended. Football was out, poker and bridge were in.

Laundry was definitely out. Deaf Dhobes had time to kill and he did it well at the Taram’s arrack shop. You could have spotted him there any evening, happy as a mosquito in a nudist colony.

Well, almost. Remember the red blood curry simmering by the front door of the shop? Even Dhobes left that one alone.

An Alternate Reality

Kiki was Toolie’s bigger and badder brother: in size, insolence, impudence, and good old Punjabi brazenness. Toolie himself was hard to pip in any of these departments, so Kiki must just have gotten an extra copy of them badass genes.  

Perhaps to cut all this down to size, someone in the family decided that Kiki must join the army. So Kiki applied for the Short Service Commission of the Indian Army that lets you serve for five years and then decide. Kiki got selected and was posted to Madras where he started boot camp. A few weeks later Toolie, Amar and I decide to visit him from IIT.

His outpost was many kilometers away and the visiting hours were Sundays, between 10 and 12.  So one Sunday morning I get out to Ganga hostel to borrow Pranish’s Yezdi. As the only one with a valid driving license, I ride. Amar piles in behind me and Toolie behind him.  

There was just one catch. The rear wheel hub assembly of the motorcycle was missing a lug nut, so in theory the wheel could come right off, anytime. Toolie assures us that this shouldn’t be a problem since he would personally check on it, as we ride along. The man kept his word.  Every kilometer or so, he’d lean over to one side to examine and certify the state of the wheel.  It was a different matter that each such inspection quadrupled the risk of keeling over; one that he so gallantly sought to contain in the first place.

We reach the campus, dismount and walk in. We spot a guy jogging by with a large log of wood on his shoulders, arms drooped over either end. It must have weighed at least 30 pounds. One look at his tortured face tells us that this was no Black Cat training schedule or some other field-martial derring-do; he was just copping punishment — military style.  After this sobering introduction, we move on to find the visitors area and see Kiki waiting for us.

“What took you all so long?” he exclaims, looking at us with the gratitude of an earthquake survivor pulled out of a two-day rubble. Kiki had been in boot camp for a few weeks and it shows.  

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here," he starts. "The guys here are crazy. They are Jats from Rajasthan, man. I mean, these guys were stripping and eating a camel with their teeth and bare hands a few weeks ago, while I was eating a dosa and sipping a shake at Nirulas in Connaught Place!  How am I supposed to keep up with these guys…” 

Kiki talks a lot. Like a bluesman, his tales convey his unremitting misery at the camp. We try changing topics to make him feel better. Our unfettered easy life at IIT just rankles him. 

“You guys have no idea how good you have it,” he proclaims. “Do you know what music they have over here? They have one English album in this entire place!  And guess what it is, Toolie?  It’s Paul Fuckin’ Anka. From the 1960s, man!” Kiki actually puts on the record to demonstrate his anguish. We lean back and take a listen. The complaints continue to flow thick and fast.

My heart goes out to him, even as my mind wanders back in time...  

I congratulate myself for standing up to my dad, years ago, in refusing to attend the physicals after clearing the National Defense Academy exam. Those old conversations play back in my head.

“You must go for the interview,” says dad. “This is the NDA. You will be an officer at twenty two! Do you have any idea how long it normally takes to become an officer in the army?”

“But Daddy, they make you toil all day. And the interview is in Allahabad — in June.  It's forty three degrees in Allahabad."

“Listen to me! You don’t know what you’re talking about. I worked in the Defense Ministry for 25 years. The NDA boys were always on top. Do you know that you can retire with a half-pension after 15 years? Where else can you do that?”

“But Daddy, did you know that they have an ambulance waiting at the NDA physicals?  Shamsheer told me… I think it’s because they ask you to jump off an eight-foot wall and a few boys actually dislocate their kneecaps! They test your body, Daddy, not your brain!"

“You just shuddup! You think you are the most intelligent fellow around and the NDA boys are all bloody fools. Just because they don’t come from your stupid St Josephs Boys School!  Let me call Periappa... tell him what a bloody idiot you are….”

Periappa (uncle) had served for decades at the Defense Services Staff College in Wellington. A week later, he would send me a beautifully hand-written letter confirming my status as a bloody idiot, while exhorting me to join the NDA. I still remember this Hollywood line — Vijay, you will join the Academy as a boy, but you will come out a man!

I still have the letter somewhere. Manhood, meanwhile, has thankfully managed to elude me. 

Watching Kiki now is supreme affirmation of my decision to ignore that sage advice years back.

Meanwhile, Kiki brings me back to the present. “Toolie, get me some music when you get here next time, OK?” he says.  We’ve started to head towards the door to take our leave. 

“When are you guys coming next?  Can you come next Sunday?” he implores. “Curly, just remind Toolie to get me some damn music!” was the last thing I heard as we left.

That visit put a new perspective on my IIT experience. Deep gratitude for my station welled up within me. I stopped bitching about the mess sambar and dosas for two straight weeks.

The Movie Buff

It’s impossible to gloss over the irrationality behind some of the ludicrous choices we made those days. I think cramming for the IIT Joint Entrance Exam had something to do with this, and here’s my conjecture.

When you start stuffing your 16-year old, 1,300 cc brain with trifles like Lagrange's mean value theorem, L’Hospital’s rule, and Friedel-Crafts alkylation, something’s gotta give. Part of your medial temporal lobe, hitherto responsible for common sense and judgment, gets repurposed.

In a seminal study of this IITian impairment, the hippocampus responsible (among other things) for making you deftly avoid a pile of steaming cow-dung on the street was shown to instead get busy — at that exact moment — extracting the rank of a skew-symmetric matrix, despite frantic signals from a despairing olfactory bulb. Sadly, this turns out to be a zero-sum game that you can painfully verify when you feel the warm stickiness on your feet.

Going out to watch a late-night movie was one such irrational choice. Getting there was a painful voyage in itself. To top that, the movie usually stank, and the trip back at 2 or 3 in the morning was a fool’s errand.

The decision to go was usually made after dinner, in the false security of a brim stomach. You would first have to bike all the way to the gate before boarding a city bus down to Mount Road.  You could start by riding your own bike. Or you could try and borrow one from Chacko or Daraius.

Your bicycle was likely the standard-issue Hero or Atlas cycle that your Dad bought for you in your first year for 280 rupees, plus 40 for the carrier and mud-guard. On the sixth day, the chain would awaken and start to grate inside its guard with every turn, for the rest of its boisterous life.

Chacko and Daraius, meanwhile, had speedsters with large gear ratios that made Bonn Avenue swish past like the autobahn. Your best option was clear — just ask one of them and hope they give in. But once you got to the gate, you would still have to wait for the bus and I think it was 19S that did the trick to Devi Theater, where most of the late shows played.

In those days, Hollywood productions made it to India a year or two after their release in the US — by third class seamail service. We accepted that benefaction gladly and slugged it out to watch deeply memorable flicks like Poltergeist and Conan the Barbarian. The ordeal of making it to the movie almost always had me sleeping right through it; but all was not lost, for someone would recap the plot on the long ride back to the hostel.

Returning from the movie was the biggest adventure of it all. You could wait for one of the really late-night buses that got you back to the IIT gate, or you could hitch a ride on a lorry. The lorries usually carried cement or bricks and got you until Saidapet, where they turned right and headed towards the new construction sites around Meenambakam airport.

After you slipped the driver a couple of bucks, you were left with the small matter of a three kilometer walk to the IIT gate, and then a ride on your rusty bike for the remaining few.

All of this for Poltergeist? Just blame your two-timing hippocampus!

One of those return trips was decidedly memorable.

The movie had been short and we didn’t want to wait for one of the scheduled buses that wouldn’t arrive until much later. So we flagged down a lorry and hopped into the cabin, alongside the driver. Something was strangely amiss that night on that lorry.

Had we been looking, the clue would have been the faceless driver whose head was completely wrapped up in a turban, leaving small slits for his eyes. He rams in a gear and the lorry lurches forward, as we hold on. In less than one minute I am battling my own bile, rising up and flooding my throat. An overpowering stench smothers the cabin in an evil miasma. I turn around, expecting to see pigs frolicking in their own manure. But it was worse. We were in a garbage truck, hauling away the vilest stuff from the filthiest metropolis in India.

I sank low in my seat and looked across at my movie companion, Annie. He was at floor level.  His eyeballs were frozen and he wasn’t breathing. But this was not the time for lifesaving maneuvers, so I let it pass.

I tried to concentrate my mind on something, on nothing — on every damn thing — but this goddamn lorry and its cargo. If you wanted to demonstrate conquest of mind over matter, this would have been the time and place.

We literally hit the ground running at Saidapet and ground to a halt to take in deep breaths of the sweet night air. The walk back to the gate renewed our lease on life.

But what the Lord taketh away, the Lord giveth. On that fateful day, He wore down my olfactory bulb to a tiny point. Years later, this would come in handy as a new father.

For I could now change the soiled diapers on my infant daughter with a smile on my mouth, rather than a wrinkle on my nose.