Although my ancestors reside in the
ganglands of northern India, I never acknowledged myself from being there and
for good reasons. Unlike greater part of India where common man is corrupt -
they are whisker short of being criminal in my native place. I never met
someone lacking in violent temperament from there...well at least till my dear
Friend Sachin Vij got married. I
remember getting a big smile when I first came to know that his wife is from my
native place and the very next moment I was worried about my friends well-being.
You see although he is a sweetheart he is also a 'Delhiite' and like me if his roots
start calling he will end up doing his peacock dance and fingering act in front
of whom, hammering Delhiites' comes naturally.
Back to my native region...I am sure there
are houses with electric meter, but bills are seldom generated and never paid.
Most of the houses take electricity as gift of nature you only need to throw a
wire to tap and harness it. Few might find it too much of a work though...electricity
seldom stays for more than few hours on a given day and when it goes will be
away for few days or weeks... God forbid if the transformer blows up... last
time it blew it didn't come for 7 months!
If you happen to travel in a local train,
better buy or befriend someone with a Torch... these train ply in absolute
darkness at night. Trains will stop a dozen time at different points before
stopping at any station. Passengers here prefer to pull chain and stop at a
point which is more convenient to them rather than debarking at the station. If the passenger fancies a
quick meal in between or pick up a fellow passenger he will pull the chain, get
down and unplug the valve pipe to carry it wherever he is going keeping the
train stranded till he returns and plug the valve pipe back. This is also a
gift of nature, local/ daily commuters remain ignorant to the concept of buying
tickets, odd balls like me have a hard time finding the person who should be
behind the ticket counter - they can be sitting in a tea stall anywhere or might
have decided not to turn up for work at all.
Here people might not have decent set of
cloth to wear but will surely have a some kind of weapon which fires... poor
and below poverty line will have 'Katta'
(homemade pistol), working middleclass keep pistols and rifles... go a bit up
and you might end up with AK47's!
So much about my roots which I have always
denied but I couldn't restrain the criminal within me... my school and college
life is marred with crime and violence committed in varying degrees and levels.
That life succumbed to an uneventful abrupt
death when I got married to a beautiful
white Cannibal! Where I use to trade in punches, kicks and abuses... my
wife feeds on human flesh, gulping on her prey's blood she loves taking big
bites of its brain and finally settle down to ruminate on the victims heart like
our buffalos chewing the cud.
Bowing to a far more terrifying form of
violence my inner devil crapped out to oblivion. Whatever traces remained of
the 'old violent me' I have placed it alongside 'my ancestral root' in my box
of 'Things I will never acknowledge'.
===
Last
time I mentioned about it was few years back when I was giving my interview for
the job which I worked for my first 2 years of marriage in Calcutta. This young petite HR lady asked 'Mr. Ashraf
you have still not collected your Degree from College! What were you doing? - ' I was doing Goonda Gardi'
2 comments:
Love your writing bro... especially the way you still didn't name your native place :)
Love the way you didn't write your name
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