The philosophical edge

LIVING IN a "moffusil area" has its Heads and Tails sides. The telephone, for example, rarely works; that's the Tails side. But when it does, what an exciting business it is! People run from all directions to answer it, and their, "Hello, hello" sounds like the SOS of a drowning man. This is the Heads part of it. Again, you can't "Get on the Web," as everyone in the city seems to do 24 hours a day. But neither can uncalled-for callers call.

One has to retain this philosophical edge in all things moffusil. Take geckos. I am an avid gecko hater; but they don't seem to mind this, and make themselves at home in our house.

Like the Pied Piper's rats, they fall into the curds, get jammed in window-sills, fall on you with their fleshy plop as you're reading. When we first came to live in Vadanemmeli village, the geckos had some sense of their place in society, and stuck, literally, to their roof environment.

But having got too big for their boots, they have now come down to Earth, and scuttle about on the floors, tripping you up. Although geckos are harmless - the myths about their poison are baseless - I would much rather have the house to myself.

Birds seem to get a bit bird-brained after a certain age, just like us. We have an elderly kingfisher living in our garden, who is short-sighted and hard of hearing. Yesterday, he dived down for an insect at my feet, then panicked when I moved and he realised I was a Living Thing. During the recent storm, when winds of 60-70 kms raged around us, he sat on the fence at the sea side, looking desperately anxious and very bedraggled. Why didn't he fly off to the safety of the large trees behind the house?

One of our fish, however, did fly. We have 20 or 30 murrel in our pond, and the wind swept one of them a good 10 metres from the pond during that windy night. We put him back into his own element the next morning, and off he swam.

Braving the cyclonic winds, our postman arrived cheerily with a letter from the publisher; inside, I knew, would be a royalty cheque for my book, "Hills in the Clouds", which is about Kodaikanal. Our watchman, on being told this, watched eagerly as I opened the envelope; he takes an interest in my writing career and loyally boasts in the village that Dorai Amma is a great writer. Perhaps this cheque would help us with the house renovations we've been planning, I thought greedily as I unfolded the crisp pink paper. I tried to hide my disappointment at the audacious "Rupees forty only" but the Truth will always be out. Bahadur looked suitably sombre. Hopefully, he figured Dorai Amma had received one, instead of the expected two lakhs.

Last week, I found myself riding on the moffusil bus, headed for Parry's Corner. I am a great fan of bus conductors: their life seems so difficult, and yet they remain so cheerful. And they have such smart leather satchels. There were some eight of us waiting at the bus stop, and as the 119C came charging round the corner, my heart sank (which is the habitual movement of my heart in any case). The bus was jam-packed; packed to bursting. People were oozing out of the two doorways and, once it stopped, you couldn't see daylight from the other side.

But the conductor, bless his heart, waved us in with "Vaanga, Vaanga!" with such hospitable vigour that I didn't want to disappoint him, and elbowed and weazled and forged my way in.

The conductor kept asking me for money, but I was pinioned to one place, in one position, and could move neither hand nor leg. At VGP, my eyes - and several others - caught a seated man picking up his bag, and we all surged towards the imminent vacancy but he was only taking out a book to read. When I finally got a s.eat in Thiruvanmiyur, it was bare wood, the foam cushioning having been scratched and worried away by passengers. But it felt like a throne.

Two rows ahead of me were two old codgers talking about Veerappan. Words like emissary and brigand have already entered Tamil, by the way. But the best was the final comment, by the less old one: "Inde scandalwood rumba valuable irkide, ilay?"

ZAI WHITAKER

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