How the World Came to Me [12]

It took me two years to find a practical application for my Morse Code oscillator. As an eleven year old, it was a chafing disappoint for me when its signals failed to venture beyond our drawing room. So I dismantled my marvelous contrivance and forgot about it for a while. And a long while it turned out to be.

In those days our town had a few devout who will loose themselves upon unsuspecting folks’ gardens before the break of dawn. After generously filling their baskets with flowers, they will make for either of the two temples in the town. Our garden was often raided thus while we slept. This pained Ma for she was fond of growing flowers, she still is. Moreover, she needed flowers for her everyday puja. I felt that I must find some means of deterring the raiders. Having attained the ripe age of thirteen I was filled with a sense of responsibility. I felt the need to contribute my mite for the defense of our home and hearth.

The solution that I came upon was to contrive to have my old oscillator function as an alarm. I brought down the circuit board gathering dust upon a shelf and re-did the warp and woof of wires upon it. The most ingenious part of my plan was to have our gate serve as the key which will complete the circuit and release the signal. The device went extinct a long time ago, but those who have seen it must know that a Morse Code transmitter had to be worked with a key. Each time you pressed the key, it looked somewhat like a see-saw, the transmitter sent across a radio signal which was received on the other end as a beep. The International Morse Code assigned each character of the Roman alphabet a number of beeps, long or short. ‘A’, for example, was ‘dot-dash’, that is, a short beep followed by a long one. When I was small, Baba had a transmitter in his office and had taught me the code. Then I could not wait to grow up and operate it with enormous headphones cupping my ears. Alas, the wish remains unfulfilled for the transmitter was junk and the technology obsolete before my voice cracked.

A picket gate led one into our garden. It was a double gate with a little tin latch on top holding the halves together. I drove a nail about an inch above the latch. I took care to place it thus that when raised the latch must touch the nail. Now I twined one copper wire around the nail and another around the latch and led them into the circuit kept in the house. I had my key. Every time someone opened the gate raising the latch metal touched metal and the circuit was completed. I had persuaded Baba to buy me a small ten watt speaker which I connected to my oscillator. When one opened the gate, a shrill, very shrill piccolo note sounded on the speaker. It was rather devilling, that yowling contraption of mine. But it told us that we have a visitor much before he reached our threshold. My device was a success and, I think, Baba was quite pleased once again. He spent some time inspecting the entire arrangement. All the while he stroked his chin and said a periodic “hmm”. I knew that for a sure sign of contentment in him.

The usually reticent but all important commendations of Baba generously added to my confidence. My alarm might caterwaul, but at least Baba did not find it ridiculous. That was all I needed. It was time I unveiled my creation before my friends. Next day in school I expended a lot of eloquence upon Shiv, Dibakar and Rajpallav making an account of my wondrous creation. I recall that Shiv and Rajpallav came after school to make an audit of my effort. Both bestowed the most lavish approval upon it. Shiv observed with his inimitable solemnity that verily even aliens will not be able to breach such a defense. Dibakar, Karge and Jumli too turned up one by one and expressed similar sentiments. I was indeed rather flattered. One feels truly blessed to have generous friends.

The alarm graced our gate for the next year and a half. I removed it when the wire fence surrounding our house and the picket gate were replaced with a brick wall and a metal gate. The clang of the new gate when opened let us know that we have company. Besides, I knew of no solution to the practical difficulty of keeping the alarm from perpetually wailing when all the gate was metallic. Completing the circuit was no more an issue, breaking it was. The challenge turned out to be insurmountable for a fourteen year old.

How the World Came to Me [11]

Sanu, he was known as Shashi in school, was a year younger to me. His parents moved into the house next to ours when he was an eight year old with a perpetually running nose. Sanu was a pale, fragile looking child. It took us a couple of years to be friends. Sanu’s shyness was too acute and he seemed afraid of everything. Often, in the afternoons after school, I will plant three stumps in our lawn and bowl at them. I used to perform great feats of bowling thus, playing Walsh and Ambrose. Sanu watched intently from the other side of the fence. But if I invited him to be the batsman he refused with a shake of the head. One day, I think I was in the sixth standard then, he agreed. He was very clumsy with the bat, but, at least, I had someone to bowl to.

It took another few months before we began having real conversations. All this time, if asked anything, Sanu only mumbled a reply, gaze firmly planted on the earth below. We got talking once we discovered that we cared for the same things. Sanu and I had a shared liking for the Phantom and could go to great lengths to buy or cadge a number. Sanu’s sources were diverse and numerous and he managed to extract of them great many issues of delectable old comics. He always loyally shared his quarry with me. I took that as my natural due, for, I do not remember when, Sanu had taken to calling me bhaiya, elder brother. I, on my part, had come to expect of him the deference and loyalty due to one. After a while, having grown comfortable playing big brother, I began fixing arbitrary rules when playing with him. Even when clean bowled by him I will find some excuse to continue batting. I recall one instance when a ball bowled by him bounced of my right thigh and hit the stumps. I insisted that I am not out as the ball had struck the thigh first. As usual, I claimed to have read about the rule in the Sporststar. That is how I always established the veracity of non-existent Cricket rules. Rearranging the bails I ordered Sanu back to the bowling mark. He seemed to be in a shade of doubt for a moment but took me for my word. Looking back after all these years I realise what a rascal I could be on occasions. But, then, twelve year old boys have perhaps never acquitted themselves with any significant measure of nobility when playing big brother.


Sanu learnt well and quick. Very soon, with his rather unusual action he was giving me enough trouble with the ball. He never ran to the bowling crease. Instead, he stood on the crease with a formal air as though about to deliver an address. Sanu held his legs firmly together and jumped a few inches’ height when delivering the ball. The delivery will reach my end vaguely resembling an off break. He was difficult to read. With the bat Sanu never made any substantial improvement, but he learnt enough to be a handy tailender. Later, when Shourob and I founded the Prenex Cricket Club, Sanu made some vital contributions with the ball and performed honorably enough with the bat. He never learnt enough of the Cricket rules though. Sanu, with a credulity which moved even the rascal in me to repentance, continued to regard me the sole authority in the matter.

Carom was another great passion of ours. We spent entire mornings on holidays and at least an hour and a half in the evenings on school days looming upon the board. Sanu grew to be so good that I had to summon the entire range of my skills to beat him. I recall that once he remained undefeated for whole two months. I prided in my pupil though wearying in the defeats. The striker tamely heeded Sanu’s hand. There was a beautiful geometrical precision about the way he dispatched the coins. We kept up a constant chatter while playing. Just as Shiv, Sanu was an excellent teller of tales. He made them up impromptu, sometimes casting ourselves, sometimes our friends in them. Of course, the plots and the situations imagined will be the most fantastical and hilarious possible. There will be times when the two of us laughed till tears ran. Sanu and I liked to play roles too. I played a wicked ancient Pharaoh I had thought up, I called him Atahutatem. Atahutatem wielded magic but not very effectively. Sanu preferred to play gun brandishing outlaws, their names kept changing. Like my Pharaoh, they were somewhat clumsy in the trade of villainy. Once we recorded an audio cassette of our exchanges. Besides Atahutatem, I remember having played a number of other characters. All were idiots of various grades. Sanu stuck to playing buffoonish thugs and goons.

When we grew a little older, I having reached the tenth standard and he ninth, we took to tramping. On a holiday we might walk the length of the town for a caper. Sometimes, we walked all the way up to Sally and back, a good ten odd kilometers. During the summer vacations we went to Deo almost every day. As we rambled, we drew numerous plans. Sanu and I trusted ourselves to visit the remotest and the most incredible of countries. In the summer of 2000, we decided to draw a comic book, something we had been planning for quite some time. That is how Taraka, mentioned above already, was born. I made Taraka a resurrected mummy. He was an Indian mummy though, the work of a mysterious pre-Harappan civilisation. An expedition of scientists digs him out of the sands of Thar. Taraka caused an awful lot of alarm when he suddenly emerged out of the swathes of bandages after being unearthed. It turned out that he had not died after all. His people had acquired the technology of slowing down a man’s metabolism and putting him in hibernation for thousands of years. Sanu drew our hero bald headed. I trust him to have improved as an illustrator in all these years, then he was comfortable drawing only bald headed men. However, I thought that a barren scalp suited our hero fine, though he looked slightly like a Buddhist monk. When we began, we were sure that we are headed for immortality like Goscinny and Uderzo. We idolised the two and were glad to be following in their hallowed footsteps. Sanu even took the trouble to learn reading Bangla so as to read the Bangla Asterix I had. Unfortunately, our work did not progress beyond two pages. So I never got to explain why my hero was chosen for the honour of being buried beneath desert sands for a few thousand years.


It was also in the summer of 2000 that we became frequent visitors to the two ‘video halls’ in the town. In the mornings and the afternoons they showed B-grade martial arts films, mostly Chinese and Korean, on a CD player. In the evenings, because of the kind of films they showed, they turned into places of disrepute and we avoided them then. Sanu was immensely fond of a Chinese action hero – Jet Lee. After watching a few of his films I grew to like him too. The plot of his films did not tax the brain much. Throughout the length of a film he will go about beating people for reasons comprehensible or incomprehensible, mostly incomprehensible. Inspired by Jet Lee’s heroism, Sanu and I decided to practice some martial arts too. So we began kicking and punching each other in the evenings for an hour or so. But we soon tired of flailing our limbs about and stopped the effort at being martial artists.

Sanu shared my fondness for music, more particularly, Rahman’s music. I have ceased to be fond of him now but in those days I devoutly followed his work and bought every new album he released. Sanu borrowed the tape as soon as I was done listening. Rahman’s harmonies and the sense of balance he possessed then had come to hold a mystical appeal for me. I think Sanu was drawn to his music for the same reasons. Sanu will insist that I play a Rahman tape when we played carom in the evenings. As we played, we discussed his recent most work, comparing it with what he had produced earlier. Often, I mutated into Atahutatem and Sanu into one his outlaws for augmenting the weight of our respective arguments. Having tried our hand in making comics and martial arts, we wondered for a while if we ought to give composing a chance. Thankfully we did not and our neighbours slept soundly.